Meet Rayce Lamb, Founder of Faithonomics and Baptist pastor seeking to inspire wild imagination. Rayce, who is also a certified financial education instructor, is passionate about supporting faith-rooted leaders to flourish spiritually and financially while pursuing creative ideas for good. He has just launched the Doers Creative, a digital community for faith-inspired creators, and also leads the Wild Imagination Fund, which seeks to eradicate poverty in his home city of Winston-Salem, NC.
In January, the World Economic Forum released a report, Faith in Action: Religion and Spirituality in the Polycrisis, arguing for the relevance of religion and spirituality in a time of complex, intersecting, global social challenges. It features several examples of collaboration between business and faith-based organizations to address some of these challenges, as well as important insights and lessons for faith, business, and other leaders. It is an invitation to forge more multi-sector collaborations that leverage the wisdom and assets of faith to drive impact at scale.
Meet Marcia Dinkins, Founder and Executive Director of Black Women Rising and creator of the Black Appalachian Coalition. Based in Ottawa Hills, OH, Marcia is elevating Black voices to help drive positive change. In Appalachia, where Black stories are particularly invisible in the narrative of poverty in the region, Marcia is engaging the Black community to tell their stories and advocate for solutions to regional issues like air pollution and healthcare access.
Like every institution in the 21st century, religion today confronts existential questions about its future, uncertain of its place in an era where trust in institutions has eroded and traditional hierarchical organizational structures have started to flatten. The formerly reliable foundations of our religious life feel insecure–for no one more than clergy, who are largely trained to be solo, prophetic leaders of congregations. But in this uncertainty lies possibility. A new book by two religious leaders, Rev. Kathleen McShane and Rabbi Elan Babchuck, will help clergy, and all faith-rooted leaders, embrace the liberating opportunity this current moment provides. It’s time to adopt a new form of leadership, free of the burdens of pyramid-shaped empire that have shaped our past.
Ending homelessness is not a pie-in-the-sky aspiration for the organization Community Solutions. They are working to actually end it and have shown it’s possible. Fourteen counties across the U.S. have already reached “functional zero” homelessness—meaning it’s rare, quickly flagged when it happens, and quickly and sustainably resolved—using the Community Solutions methodology. In this Ashoka interview, founder Roseanne Haggerty talks about the approach and methodology.
Meet Nikole Lim, Founder of Freely in Hope, which works to end the cycle of sexual violence through the leadership and advocacy of survivors. Nikole is a filmmaker, storyteller, and dedicated advocate. Her innovative work centers the leadership of sexual violence survivors in Kenya and Zambia, highlighting the power of survivors to lead us to a violence-free world.
Meet Ambereen Khan, executive producer and host of Inspired, a production of Interfaith Voices, an award-winning independent public radio show that fosters interfaith understanding through exploring how faith intersects with news, politics, and culture. Ambereen is a beautiful interviewer and also a longtime interfaith advocate and innovator. Among many other things, she was co-founder of Muslim Advocates and the first Muslim to chair the Interfaith Alliance Foundation. We are honored to count her as an ally and advisor to innoFaith.
If you need a place to start, read We Need to Build: Fieldnotes for Diverse Democracy, a new book by Eboo Patel, Founder of Interfaith America. It is at once a rare tribute in these anti-institutional times to the importance of civic institutions, and a broad call to action relevant to an era of rapidly multiplying social movements. But unlike most calls to action these days, We Need to Build does not emotionally incite us to a particular political position or rally us behind a cause. It invites us to do the deep, sustained work of building the society we want.
Meet Sandy Hong, Assistant Director at Glean Network and Steering Committee Member of KQTx. Sandy is a wise and skilled innovator and community-builder who we’ve had the privilege to get to know through an innoFaith partnership with Glean Network.
Meet Ally McKinney Timm, passionate human rights advocate and founder of Justice Revival. As a lawyer and person of faith, Ally saw a need for Christian communities to understand their role in human rights. She started Justice Revival to engage these communities in helping safeguard human rights for all through education, advocacy, and collaboration. This work includes exciting interfaith collaboration to advance human rights goals, such as passing the Equal Rights Amendment.
Meet Rev. Dr. Amy Butler, current pastor at National City Christian Church in Washington, DC, and founder of Invested Faith. Amy helps churches give new life to their assets—especially at what can be an otherwise painful stage of winding down—by investing in faith-rooted social entrepreneurs. Amy and Invested Faith remind us that God is always at work in the world if we are open to seeing that work in new ways.
Faith-based innovation is having a moment. Or at least the start of a moment, one that will likely continue for some time as faith institutions wrestle with questions of how to remain relevant in this day and age and into a future of uncertainty. Faith-based innovation is by no means new, though, as Kenda Creasy Dean, professor at Princeton Theological Seminary and co-founder of Ministry Incubators, points out in her new book, Innovating for Love. And we definitely should not view it merely as a solution to institutional crisis, or a balm for institutional anxiety.
Meet Sara Abdel, passionate and collaborative interfaith advocate for women, refugees, and economic justice. Originally from Egypt, Sara’s search for knowledge and justice and commitment to putting her faith into action has taken her to Capitol Hill and numerous local and global organizations and companies. Founder of Thrivers on the Move, she now directs her energies toward supporting immigrants and refugees to find jobs and careers where they can thrive.
Meet Rev. Cynthia Johnson-Oliver, preacher, poet, and public servant. Cynthia is founder of the FaithJustice Foundation, as well as the Bishop Joseph Johnson History Project, which she created to tell the story of her grandfather, the first African American to graduate from Vanderbilt University, and his role in civil rights history. Cynthia carries on her grandfather’s legacy not just by sharing his story but through her deep dedication to social justice in our time.
Meet Brother Lawrence Whitney, priest in the Lindisfarne community, former university chaplain, and innovator working on de-institutionalizing chaplaincy so that all people and communities have access to spiritual health resources. Larry envisions chaplaincy tapping into a variety of religious traditions to help individuals and communities connect to meaning and purpose. He’s piloting this vision in the Mission Hill neighborhood of Boston, MA.
We are thrilled to announce the In[HEIR]itance Project as the winner of the innoFaith award, given as part of Soularize Live in October 2021. The In[HEIR]itance Project—co-founded by Jon Adam Ross, Chantal Pavageaux, and Ariel Warmflash—uses participatory artmaking as a way to lower barriers to relationship. They build bridges in communities, create space for difficult conversations, and open pathways for change in one of the most creative models we’ve seen for interfaith engagement toward social impact.
Meet Brie Loskota, new Executive Director of the Martin Marty Center for the Public Understanding of Religion, former Executive Director of the Center for Religion and Civic Culture at USC, co-founder of the American Muslim Civic Leadership Incubator, and many other things. She is a curious and creative champion of pluralism, a deep thinker, and a prolific doer.
Meet Rabbi Sid Schwarz, interfaith leader and serial entrepreneur. Rabbi Sid is a Senior Fellow at Hazon and has birthed and led numerous initiatives in the field of Jewish life, leadership, education, and community, including PANIM: The Institute for Jewish Leadership and Values, the Clergy Leadership Incubator, Kenissa: Communities of Meaning, and many more. Sid is a relentless visionary, perpetually pushing the boundaries of what faithful leadership can and must be in a changing world, always with humility, grace, and humor.
Meet Sadaf Taimur, mother, PhD student, Dalai Lama Fellow, and passionate advocate, educator, and innovator. Sadaf previously developed a project to address gender discrimination in education in her native Pakistan. Now, she is engaged in action-oriented research on transformative sustainability education, which recently won her a Green Talents Award from Germany’s Federal Ministry of Education and Research.
Meet Yasmine Arrington, social entrepreneur and so much more. Yasmine started her organization ScholarCHIPS as a junior in high school, turning her own experience into a way to support many other young people. She has won tons of awards and been featured in TeenVogue, Essence, Forbes, the Washington Post, and more. Through university and divinity school, she continued to grow her organization and now runs it full-time. And if that weren’t enough, she also models and hosts a podcast, Millennial Minds.
Even before the pandemic abruptly disrupted the entire planet all at once, our world had become a place of constant change and accompanying uncertainty. It’s a new game, different than the one many of us have been taught to play - the one that plotted a linear, generally secure path from education to job to career. And to power, for those with the ambition and privilege to land in positions of leadership. The game has changed, and how we equip ourselves for it is the question at the heart of a new book by Henry De Sio, Changemaker Playbook: The New Physics of Leadership in a World of Explosive Change. Hint: everyone leads.
Meet Rev. Chris Davies, one of our favorite “intrapreneurs,” using her innovation mindset and talents to help renew a faith institution from within. She also created Queer Clergy Trading Cards to celebrate the gifts of queer clergy and support queer and trans youth organizations.
Meet Reem Rahman, passionate mom and systems change expert, one of the folks behind the beautiful changemaking.net resource from Ashoka in our resource library. Reem brings her deep faith, curiosity, and commitment to everything she does, which now includes creating the most compelling homeschool we’ve ever heard of and writing a children’s book.
![Marrying sacred text and civic conversation, the In[HEIR]itance Project opens pathways for change](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5b184e7c5417fc518fc0445a/1636732057948-982ZO44BKNBHH2YCCAD3/Inheiritance+Project+Cover+Image+2.jpg)
