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.

Are you a creative communications professional who wants to help inspire and engage faith communities to innovate and collaborate? We’re super excited to focus on expanding our reach and potential. Join us!

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.

I had the pleasure of being part of Spencer Burke’s Next Sunday Summit last month. Check out my conversation with Spencer on how our purpose as faith communities matters more than our form and how we need to expand our horizons and imagination about our spiritual, community, and change power.

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.

This FREE 14-day virtual summit features interviews with 30 extraordinary leaders, spiritual teachers, healers, and changemakers, including innoFaith founder Danielle Goldstone. Together we will reimagine the next form (or forms) of church & faith.

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.

For a long time—long before the recent leak of a U.S. Supreme Court draft opinion suggesting the Court is poised to overturn Roe v. Wade—I’ve wished we could have a more nuanced cultural conversation about abortion. A conversation that would fully respect the rights of women without having to deny the sanctity of life before birth, that would trust women while embracing that women have different perspectives on the topic, that would center the equity issue of discrepancies in healthcare based on wealth and race, that would have as its goal creating the best outcomes for both women and children. Such a conversation feels like a pipe dream.

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.

A Way Out of No Way pushes us to interrogate the forces and narratives that shape our own thinking. It makes us ask whether and how our innovation will perpetuate or transform the dynamics that exile people to the margins of society. Doing so will undoubtedly make all of us more effective change makers.

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.

We’re super excited about this webinar series being put on by our friends at Faith + Finance. Don’t miss it!

Join Faith+Finance for the premier series “Building a Just + Loving Economy” as they explore how the economy works and how it can become an expression of our deepest values.

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.

On a recent call, a friend of mine in Poland shared his take that the innovation of the underground Solidarity movement in 1980s Poland was that it basically ignored the tanks on the streets that threatened political repression. While the tanks rolled, the people went about building their own underground civil society, which then became the foundation for democratization. Surely they couldn’t actually ignore the threat, and Solidarity continued to organize protests against the government even after they went underground. But I think he meant that they did not let the tanks steal their focus. They didn't just act against something, they built something new. Underground, they built the structures for a democratic society.

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.