An Innovation Accelerator to Re-Discover your Lilly Proposal
Over the past year, church leaders across the nation overwhelmingly answered the Lilly Endowment’s call for applicants to their most recent grant competition aimed at developing thriving congregations during this particular moment in history. Lilly’s latest grant round includes 92 organizations, churches, denominations, nonprofits and theological schools from nearly every geography and Christian tradition across the US. But The Lilly Endowment can’t fund everyone. Yet, we believe there is still Spirit-birthed promise in your proposal.
Don't Give Up on Your Grant Idea!
Bring your team to an exclusive accelerator experience to discover new possibilities for bringing your proposal to life.
Begins January 2021!
Three-Month Innovation Training
Practical Teaching
Optional Personalized Coaching
Coming January 12 - March 26, 2021
God gave you the vision laid out in detail in your grant proposal. But then your organization, like hundreds of others, wasn’t given the funding you hoped for.
What if you could still pursue the vision that God laid on your heart, but in a reimagined way?
How might God use this disappointing news to bring about greater dependence? What if God is directing your steps in new ways?
Fresh Expressions US was also rejected for funding, but that ‘no’ has invigorated us. We’re more excited than ever to take that ‘no’ and turn it into a, ‘how else might we still accomplish our vision for congregational vitality?' We’re getting creative about rethinking our execution plan and hope to inspire you to do the same.
We’re inviting you to step into a 10-week cohort where you’ll receive five weeks of training for how to reimagine your grant idea with your leadership team. Mixed in between those sessions are five weeks of self-led workshops where you’ll take the learnings from the previous week’s training and work it out with your team.
January 12, 1-3pmET - Week 1: Letting Go & Listening in Order to Rebuild
In order to reimagine the plan you set forth in your proposal, you’ll have to let go of the plan you originally laid out - not the vision, but the specifics for how you were going to execute that vision. In this session, we will explore how you might embrace some practices of listening to God and empathy-building with the people you would have served through your proposal, in order to deconstruct your plan and get to the core of what problem you are trying to solve.
Beginning Jan 18th - Week 2: Determining Core Needs (Two Hour Self-Led Workshop)
You and your team will take the learnings from the week prior and be given a worksheet guide and strategy that will help you:
- Let go of the plan you had originally created that was dependent on Lilly funding
- Get to the core need you originally intended to solve through some clarifying need statements
Jan 26th, 1-3pmET - Week 3: Going Wide: Exploring Novel Ways to Execute the Vision
In this session, you will learn tools for how to think creatively and abundantly about how to accomplish the vision. You'll learn how to utilize divergent thinking tools and exercises as well as conduct fruitful brainstorming sessions. You will learn the principles behind innovative brainstorming: encouraging wild ideas, going for quantity not quality, novelty over relevance, and much more.
Beginning Feb 1 - Week 4: Divergent Thinking and Brainstorming (Two Hour Self-Led Workshop)
You and your team will take the learnings from the week prior and be given a worksheet guide that will help you:
- Utilize the divergent thinking tools and brainstorming principles taught in week 3 to come up with 100 novel ways of executing your vision
- Understand new ways to engage the creative process with your current and future teams.
Jan 26th, 1-3pmET - Week 3: Going Wide: Exploring Novel Ways to Execute the Vision
In this session, you will learn tools for how to think creatively and abundantly about how to accomplish the vision. You'll learn how to utilize divergent thinking tools and exercises as well as conduct fruitful brainstorming sessions. You will learn the principles behind innovative brainstorming: encouraging wild ideas, going for quantity not quality, novelty over relevance, and much more.
Beginning Feb 1 - Week 4: Divergent Thinking and Brainstorming (Two Hour Self-Led Workshop)
You and your team will take the learnings from the week prior and be given a worksheet guide that will help you:
- Utilize the divergent thinking tools and brainstorming principles taught in week 3 to come up with 100 novel ways of executing your vision
- Understand new ways to engage the creative process with your current and future teams.
Feb 9th, 1-3pmET - Week 5: How to Unearth Your Top Ideas
In this session, you’ll learn how to determine what factors your organization will need to consider as evaluative criteria in order to determine which of your ideas will most likely work and which ideas will not. For example, will your idea need to fall within a certain budget? Will it require volunteer support? Will it need to be executed within a specific time frame? Only you and your team will know the top criteria, but we will give you tools to help you determine your top idea-evaluating criteria in order to whittle your ideas down.
Beginning Feb 15 - Week 6: Evaluation Criteria (Two Hour Self-Led Workshop)
In this session, you’ll learn how to determine what factors your organization will need to consider as evaluative criteria in order to determine which of your ideas will most likely work and which ideas will not. For example, will your idea need to fall within a certain budget? Will it require volunteer support? Will it need to be executed within a specific time frame? Only you and your team will know the top criteria, but we will give you tools to help you determine your top idea-evaluating criteria in order to whittle your ideas down.
Feb 23rd, 1-3pmET - Week 7: How to Prototype Your Ideas & Fail Forward
In this session, you will learn how to ‘flesh out’ those ideas by prototyping (physically drawing or acting out low-quality versions of a product or service). You will learn how to take your top 3 ideas and prototype them with your team in order to determine which idea is rising to the top and worth piloting. We will also explore the fear of failure which keeps us from risky ideas and more innovative approaches, and discuss how prototyping helps tone down that fear of failure and instead gives us the freedom to explore and play with novel ideas.
Beginning March 1 - Week 8: Prototyping Your Idea (Two Hour Self-Led Workshop)
You and your team will take the learnings from the week prior and be given a worksheet guide that will help you:
- Create at least 1 prototype of a potential solution
March 9th, 1-3pmET - Week 9: From Prototyping to Piloting Your Idea
In this session, you will learn how to take your prototype and implement your idea as a pilot. The word ‘pilot’ assumes that it will not be the final version, but instead has been released for the sake of refinement and feedback. We will also explore, what ‘success’ looks like for your idea. What specific metrics or goals will you need to ‘hit’ in order for you to know if the pilot has been successful or if it may need tweaking?
Beginning March 15 - Week 10: Refinement and Implementation (Two Hour Self-Led Workshop)
You and your team will take the learnings from the week prior and be given a worksheet guide that will help you:
- Determine what ‘success’ will look like for your pilot
- Create a plan for taking your prototyping and turning it into a piloted program/service/product
March 9th, 1-3pmET - Week 9: From Prototyping to Piloting Your Idea
In this session, you will learn how to take your prototype and implement your idea as a pilot. The word ‘pilot’ assumes that it will not be the final version, but instead has been released for the sake of refinement and feedback. We will also explore, what ‘success’ looks like for your idea. What specific metrics or goals will you need to ‘hit’ in order for you to know if the pilot has been successful or if it may need tweaking?
Beginning March 15 - Week 10: Refinement and Implementation (Two Hour Self-Led Workshop)
You and your team will take the learnings from the week prior and be given a worksheet guide that will help you:
- Determine what ‘success’ will look like for your pilot
- Create a plan for taking your prototyping and turning it into a piloted program/service/product
March 23rd, 1-3pmET - Week 11: Pitch Week! (Available to Those Who Complete the Process)
This week, you (team leader) will be asked to ‘pitch’ your idea and pilot plan verbally to the other groups in this cohort. You will then be given the time and space to receive constructive feedback from the other teams in order to keep refining your idea.
Not only do we desire this week to be helpful for your team to refine your idea, but we also want to foster conversation and networking here between the organizations who have been participating over the past 10 weeks who will all pitch their ideas.
