Meet an innoFaither: Jonathan Hayden
Meet Jonathan Hayden, Vice President of Operations at Leadership Foundations, a faith-based network that drives spiritual and social change in cities throughout the world through the unique lens of envisioning cities as playgrounds. With Jonathan’s leadership at their Colangelo Carpenter Innovation Center, Leadership Foundations supports churches to, among other things, move from charity-based models to systemic change. They are also working to equip young people as social and spiritual leaders for their cities. After 17 years in Washington, DC, Jonathan and his family are now enjoying a slower pace of life in Chapel Hill, NC.
What faith(s), if any, do you practice? How does your tradition and/or spiritual practice inspire or influence you as an innovator?
I am Christian and try to follow the teaching of Christ—who he actually was and not what some in the current culture would have you believe. One of several spiritual practices for me is reading, and not necessarily books about faith or spirituality. I like learning about things and thinking about how to apply them to my work. Sometimes a theory or a new practice in a field can translate in ways we may not expect. For example, the "corner 3" in basketball—a 3 point shot from the corner where it is more efficient. The distance of that spot in the arc is shorter and therefore higher percentage and worth 50% more than a shot just a few feet in. It's kind of amazing that this efficiency was not fully revealed before the analytics age in basketball. I think we can take that knowledge and think about where the corner 3s are in our work. Where are we missing a similar advantage that might be more strategic and yield disproportionate impact with the same resources?
On the more spiritual side, a colleague of mine has put me on to The Examen, a Jesuit practice that encourages you to think about what in your life is giving you energy, bringing you closer to God, freeing you, and then, what is doing the opposite. I've found that, on my better days, I'm engaging in that practice more intentionally.
What are you currently working on?
In late 2024, we were grateful to get a grant from The Lilly Endowment to support a new initiative called The Barnabas Project. The Barnabas Project engages young Christians, aged 18- 24, through a theological formation process that incorporates service in their community. Barnabas Fellows will go through a curriculum that explores theology and reflections on faith, and through Leadership Foundations (LF) affiliates, they will participate in service-learning opportunities each month with local partners. The curriculum is designed to nurture, challenge and ultimately provide ballast for the Barnabas Fellows as they enter adulthood and make further discoveries of their own talents and vocational desires. We are on the front end of building the program, policies, and procedures but plan to launch this fall. Over the next 5 years, we will develop over 500 next generation leaders who care for the social and spiritual redemption of their cities.
What can we find you doing when you’re not working?
I work out of my home and therefore struggle to have boundaries between work and home life sometimes. I love being home with the kids just behind that door (but I do need a door and occasionally a lock). My wife and I have two boys aged 10 and 12 who are into sports so shuttling from practice to practice tends to dominate my free time.
What is piquing your curiosity these days?
One of my roles at Leadership Foundations is to work in our innovation Center, The Colangelo Carpenter Innovation Center (CCIC). The CCIC provides a creative space with the LF network to generate and scale innovative programs, partnerships, and practices to support cities around the world.
One of the ways we do this is by working with Senior Innovation Fellows who offer expertise to projects in development. Senior Innovation Fellows have been an invaluable resource to LF in research and development of ideas. We wanted to leverage that resource, so we've been going through a design process in order to identify and define what makes programs and cities flourish. As we ventured into this process, we discovered that for every one of our Senior Innovation Fellows, the work they have done in their esteemed careers was successful and productive to the degree that they were befriended by others. We've been digging into this idea of "Guilds of Friendship" and how to build a framework around it that can be duplicated elsewhere for redemptive impact. It's been a really fun process that we hope to share.
What is something you’d like help on?
Another initiative my colleagues and I are working on is our Charity To Change program. In 2020, through the Lilly Endowment's Thriving Congregations Initiative, we built Charity To Change to equip churches with the skills, knowledge, and tools essential to build closer connections with their local communities, to develop a better understanding of their socio-cultural context, and to be responsive to their most pressing needs. In short, the program is aimed to help churches move their outreach from charity alone to looking at systemic change in their cities. We have worked through 19 Leadership Foundations affiliates to engage about 200 churches. In 2024, Lilly generously gave us the opportunity to scale that work. To discern the best ways to do so, we sought feedback from churches that had participated in the initiative and were heartened to learn that many desired to deepen the work in their respective cities in collaboration with the cohort of local churches with which they had built relationships. They wanted more resources and curricula, so we will build some domain specific curricula for them. For example, with the Leadership Foundations network, we have expertise in many areas—mentoring programs, affordable housing initiatives, workforce development, etc. But we also want this part of Charity To Change to be an ecosystem of content relevant to the issues that cities and congregations face today, and we know there are others who possess knowledge, trainings, tools, and resources that could help churches. So, as a church or church collective has a desire or a need, we are looking for partners in this work that would be able to offer specific expertise.
What is something you can offer others in the innoFaith network?
This may be a shameless plug, but recently my colleague Dave Hillis and I, through funding from the Fetzer Institute, were fortunate to put our hands to an anthology entitled City As Playground, featuring 19 theologians, thought leaders, and practitioners exploring the power of seeing the city as a playground rather than a battleground. This has been a theme of the Leadership Foundations network—we try to see and act through this metaphor, and it allows for a new vision where innovation, creativity, collaboration, and abundance are more valued than status quo, competition, and scarcity. Metaphors tend to change our perspective and the idea of seeing the city as a playground rather than a battleground is more than just a poetic means to help us frame collaborative action in a city or community, but it can actually change the way we see and act collectively. For the project, we explored this idea with over 40 folks and asked 19 of them to contribute essays considering this idea. We think the essays provide a common vision to encourage collective and collaborative action, reimagining and reshaping the way people think about cities and the people in them not as problems to be solved but as vessels for God’s redemptive plan for humanity.
You can find Jonathan at Leadership Foundations or occasionally via LinkedIn (which he checks every so often “begrudgingly”).