Welcome to innoFaith

Meet Dr. Alaa Murabit, a physician and Founder & CEO of RAIS (Resilient Architecture for Integration & Security). Her work spans security, child and adolescent flourishing, and new financing models, including faith-based finance. At 21, she founded Voice of Libyan Women during Libya’s revolution, working with communities and religious leaders to advance women’s rights and inclusive security. She created the first zakat-approved philanthropic collaborative dedicated exclusively to maternal and newborn health, For Mama (since evolved into the independent organization Every Pregnancy). The model she created has mobilized over US$130 million across three Ramadan campaigns so far. She also conceived and co-created The Beginnings Fund, a US$600 million maternal and newborn health collaborative. Based in Cambridge, MA, she is a co-architect and advocate of the UN Sustainable Development Goals, Board Chair of Girls Not Brides, and a Commissioner on the Lancet–Georgetown Commission on Faith, Trust & Health.

A new book by professors Michael Karlberg and Derik Smith, Rethinking Social Justice: Theory and Action in an Age of Transition offers language, along with an academic and historical foundation, for precisely such a new understanding of power. They provocatively—yet humbly and persuasively—challenge the status quo narrative of social justice as primarily distributive justice and of contentious politics as the most effective means to achieve it.

Meet Omar Nassimi, Co-founder of PVBLIC House, a hub for people working for social good, and Assistant Director of Social Innovation at the humanitarian organization IDEA. Growing up surrounded by the diversity of his Muslim tradition, Omar developed a deep curiosity toward the possibilities of faith and positive social change that still drives him today. Omar lives in northern Virginia but can be found at coffee shops or events across the DC area (known locally as the DMV).

There’s a legendary story in international development circles about a campaign to get mosquito nets to millions of people in countries being ravaged by malaria, a disease that kills more than 600,000 people a year. Mosquito nets are a proven strategy to prevent this deadly disease. A lot of effort and resources went into the research and then into designing a way to distribute nets to hard-to-reach communities. Millions of nets were distributed, a seemingly huge success. Until researchers visited some of the communities to follow up.

Meet Kevin Singer, innoFaith’s new Communications and Engagement Director and faith-rooted social innovator. An evangelical Christian deeply committed to pluralism, Kevin founded Neighborly Faith to support young evangelicals to dialogue with people of other faith traditions. Kevin, who is also an Aspen Institute Religion Fellow, loves living in a religiously and politically diverse part of the country in Raleigh, NC. We’re thrilled to have him join the innoFaith team!

Francesca Reznik, our outgoing Communications and Engagement Manager, had the opportunity last month to participate in Faith For Our Planet’s inaugural Faith in Her: Women of Faith Climate Leaders fellowship at Harvard Divinity School as an instructor. Read about her experience.

Meet Sarah Hansman, a doctoral student in theological ethics at Boston College, hospital chaplain at Boston Medical Center-Brighton, and a prison minister. Sarah is passionate about bringing together the worlds of theology, ministry, and community organizing. Her interests include the role of imagination in shaping moral agency and lay authority especially as it pertains to sex and gender, immigration, politics, and carceral justice.  

There's a moment from my theoretically successful but short-lived piano-playing phase in my youth that I will never forget.  At a lesson one day, my piano teacher, Mrs. K, took away the music sheets and told me to just play something of my own. I can't remember if she articulated it quite this way, but in my memory, she effectively told me to compose something on the spot. I held my hands over the keyboard for what felt like an eternity of silence. I froze. I was terrified to play even a single note. Mrs. K finally relieved me of the embarrassment, and we went back to our usual lessons.

Meet Dr. Sherry Molock, creator of HAVEN-Connect, an initiative to engage Black churches to help prevent suicide among Black youth. As a pastor and a psychologist, Dr. Molock understands both the challenges and potential of the church as a player in the mental health arena. She decided to help churches overcome stigma around mental health to become part of the solution to the crisis. Dr. Molock lives in the Washington, DC, area where she teaches at George Washington University, and her pilot initiative with Black churches is currently running with twelve churches in the state of New York.

Something quietly powerful is happening at the intersection of two forces that have long been kept in separate rooms: mental health care and faith. For decades, the relationship between clergy and clinicians was marked more by suspicion than collaboration — the pulpit on one side, the therapist's office on the other. But that wall is coming down.