Ministry Leadership Development is sponsored by Charis Foundation. This program strengthens local churches and parachurch organizations by improving leadership capacity across various dimensions, including executive leadership, group dynamics, development, and fundraising.

Grantmaking — Charis Foundation We exist to serve the work of our partner organizations and their leaders. As a grantmaking foundation, we see our role as one of supporting, shepherding, and championing the faithful efforts of our partner organizations to proclaim and demonstrate the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Our partner organizations look at a world filled with brokenness and confusion, and respond bravely and faithfully with their gospel-driven love, hope, creativity, and passion. Because we are stewarding a limited amount of resources relative to the scale of the problems and issues we could potentially address with those resources, we seek to be thoughtful, prayerful, and humble in our approach to grantmaking.

One well-respected source has identified 12 ministry sectors , every one of which we believe is worthy of attention and giving from Christians. Within each of these sectors (and perhaps others we could define), we expect we could find many well-run and faithful organizations to support, whether in Nashville, around the US, or internationally.

But in considering how to apply our grant budget, and the even more limited resources of our time and attention, it has seemed to us that to spread these resources across too wide a landscape is to dilute their effect entirely. So instead of being a “mile wide and an inch deep,” we have tried to define some areas where we might be able to have more impact by concentrating more of our attention and grant dollars.

This is an ongoing process for us, but so far we have identified a couple of these strategic areas and have defined grant programs around certain ideas, as described below. In this grant program we seek to make grants to organizations that are engaged in the very broad and multifaceted faith and work movement.

Many Christians are wrestling with how best to embody their faith and love their neighbors in all aspects of their working life, even in industries or workplaces typically thought of as “secular. ” We partner with organizations and initiatives across the spectrum from thought/content leadership to practical application/training.

This program also includes grants to further the training or mentoring of impoverished, unemployed, or “unemployable” populations (individuals battling addictions, ex-offenders, etc.), where the program includes sharing of the gospel and/or Christian theology regarding work. To learn more about the faith and work movement, see this resources page from our friends at the Nashville Institute for Faith and Work.

Ministry Leadership Development This program seeks to make grants that strengthen the local church and parachurch by improving leadership capacity across a wide range of dimensions. Even in faithful and well-intentioned church congregations and parachurch organizations, leadership deficiencies can limit the effectiveness of gospel ministry and the accomplishment of program goals.

Depending on the organization, additional attention to and investment in one or more of the following subject areas may be the best means of advancing the mission of the organization: executive leadership & group dynamics development and fundraising evaluation of program outcomes/impact succession/contingency planning Often these needs are obvious both to internal participants and external observers, but the urgent demands on leaders to finance and deliver the core program limits the ability or willingness of these leaders to build organizational capacity to meet these intermediate-and longer-term needs.

Our Ministry Leadership Development grant program is designed to provide directed funding to help address these needs across all sectors of gospel-driven organizations. We seek to make grants both to organizations whose mission is to offer this type of training, and to organizations who have identified a need for this type of training but lack the funding to bring it about.

Although we intend for much of the growth in our grantmaking to occur in the strategic programs described above, we have many long-standing relationships with organizations that do not fit neatly into those programs.

As we have transitioned our funding priorities we continue to value the work these long-standing partners are doing and have no plans to reduce the grant budget allocated to that work, although as a proportion of our giving we anticipate it may grow at a slower rate. We also have some limited funding available for “one-off” needs outside of the strategic program areas, such as capital campaigns and emergency relief needs.

See our FAQs page for answers to some common questions about our grantmaking.