Our blog can help you find your place in God’s story, practicing and proclaiming the gospel in the everyday.
Build confidence and capacity within a congregation that is considering selling their church property with our new tool.
Are you action-oriented and entrepreneurial? Someone who loves to network, communicate, and close on sales? Interested in sharing excellent resources to help faith-based leaders do their work better? A team player who wants to help grow a national nonprofit? Then we are looking for you!
Friends, the time has come! We are thrilled to share the RootedGood Good Futures Accelerator Impact Report with you.
Join Mycelium between November 25, 2022 and December 3, 2022 and receive 50% off your first year of membership!
Church buildings are underused and often in locations where there is demand for space. Learn more how churches are increasingly taking advantage of rental income as they are trying to develop a sustainable economic model and how you can, too.
Don’t let confusion about taxes stop you from doing something new, say two experts in faith-based social enterprise.
Where to Start is a collaborative project to support you — a faith leader who may not know what to do with your resources.
A lot happened for RootedGood in 2021! Read more about it in our annual report here.
Learn more about impact investing and how to put investment money to work to make more good in the world.
One of the enduring challenges for churches engaging in social enterprise is unfamiliarity and unease with the language, concepts and practices that have their home in business and economics.
Mission Possible is a game that takes participants through the design thinking process from big problems to creative use of resources to innovative solutions all in less than 2 hours.
What taxes do churches have to pay on revenue generating activity and to whom? Is their tax-exempt status put in jeopardy by engaging in social enterprise? How do churches and faith-based organizations make sense of federal, state, and local tax regulations?
Is your church considering working with a property developer to do something new on your property? RootedGood’s new tool, How to Develop Well, can help!
Is your church considering starting a new activity in order to generate revenue or do you have questions about how your activities might impact your tax status? RootedGood’s tool, What About Taxes?! can help.
Thanks to generous donors who stepped forward during our fall campaign, we have been able to give our Mission Possible design thinking game to nonprofit organizations doing work around the country to support mental health.
This fall we are going to be giving away 20 Mission Possible games to non-profits doing work to support mental health so that they can build capacity and make an even greater impact. Help us help them!
This report captures the learning and reflection from the innovative Change Makers Project, a partnership between Wesley Theological Seminary & Baltimore-Washington Methodist Conference supported by RootedGood.
This Money + Mission Alignment tool is designed to help organizations evaluate their alignment of money and mission in order to do both, better. Gain a deeper understanding of how money and mission intersect in your organization by learning this framework and applying to your context.
What Next? is based upon the general design of What Now? but with a broader application to ministry contexts beyond the local congregation (such as camps, campus ministries, etc.) and looking beyond the pandemic environment.
Let's Talk About Resources is designed to facilitate creative and imaginative conversations about how churches can use their resources in service to their local community.
Social impact organization have to tell good stories. Thankfully, storytelling can be learned and improved. Make It Memorable is a simple game that will help you and your team tell better stories.
Based on the children's story of the Three Little Pigs, this short, engaging exercise will help your team discuss what is going well and what needs some attention in your organization.
This mini-tool will help you be more observant about the world around you and draw new conclusions about your community.
The “What Now?” tool will guide you and your leadership team through an engaging, efficient, and interactive process for making decisions about how to fulfill your mission in the current environment.
How Will We Gather? is interactive and will spark generative conversation, helping to create consensus among your team about the best ways forward.
The community discovery tool is designed to help identify the different places in your context where people are interacting in new ways and where communities are forming, and create a map that can be used as a scavenger hunt or trail.
Agree! Entrepreneurship is about transforming the world by solving big problems. While entrepreneurship includes creating a business and scaling it to generate a profit, entrepreneurship is about being a part of the solution, making a difference, and contributing to the world’s flourishment.
The church has been static, in decline, and operating with an insufficient resource model for too long. We know things have to change.
We all know that what gets counted counts, but what do you do when you know the wrong things are getting counted (i.e., measured)?
Learn more about the value of RootedGood’s self-directed tools, games, and processes. Our tools can save you more than $7000 and 30 hours of time.
A good friend tells you how it really is -- the good and sometimes hard-to-hear truths. And measurement -- done well -- will do just that.
2020 was a year with a lot of challenges but we pivoted and found ways to thrive and help others succeed. We are delighted to look back and see all that was achieved. Download our 2020 Annual Report and have a look at what 2020 was all about for us!
Join the RootedGood team - we are hiring! We are looking for a committed and detail oriented individual to join us as our Operations & Project Manager. Apply today.
Mission Possible had an unusual beginning - a way of avoiding speaking engagements! Read about the story of where Mission Possible came from and discover some of the wide variety of contexts the tool has been used in.
We have been thrilled with the positive response from pastors and leaders to our recently released interactive planning tool: What Now? Here are a few tips for how to use the tool well in your context.
If we came up with a list of 'what we (think we) do well' as an organization, somewhere near the top of the list would be designing interactive learning experiences and workshops.
RootedGood co-founder & lead-cultivator, Shannon Hopkins, and her godson invited their neighbors to take 50 Lego pieces and make something. The results demonstrated how small, simple experiments in creativity can be communal and fun.
Mark Elsdon discusses his life and new book with John Terrill of UpperHouse on the Upper Word Podcast.
Read more about RootedGood's collaboration with PC(USA) on our "What Next?" tool and other resources to help organizations plan for life post-pandemic.
In an article written for Faith + Lead, RootedGood Co-Founder, Mark Elsdon, writes on how many Christian churches in the United States have large amounts of "hidden" wealth in invested assets and property and reminds readers of a hard truth: this enormous wealth was made possible by two key stolen inputs: land and people. Land that was stolen from indigenous people and people were stolen from their land. Mark Elsdon offers readers two suggestions on how Churches can help repair injustices of the past by thinking about and supporting reparations in their contexts.
Mark Elsdon is a social innovator, author, business and theological person who talks about his work with RootedGood and PresHouse.
Impact investing has the potential to radically transform our faith communities. Intrigued? Mark Elsdon helps you dream up the possibilities for your church in this article.
Despite sleepless nights, hair pulled out, and unfinanceable mortgages, Mark Elsdon says, "We Aren't Broke." On what grounds? Actually, on the ground beneath his building and other church assets.
RootedGood founders shared thoughts on economic innovation in the church as plenary speakers at the October 2020 Faith+Finance Church Economics conference. Watch here.
Innovation isn’t a good unto itself; at its core, innovation is about solving problems, says RootedGood co-founder Shannon Hopkins. Read her 10 guidelines for faithful innovation.
Craig Mattson, of Spiritual Capital renown, converses with Mark Sampson, one of RootedGood's co-founders, on the need for us to think deeply about the phrase 'social enterprise'.
Organizational change isn’t for the faint of heart. In this podcast, RootedGood co-founder Shannon Hopkins explores what it is to lead well when success means letting go.
In this podcast with Craig Mattson, Mark Sampson explores some of the concepts and ideas that inform RootedGood’s approach to impact measurement.
A partner of RootedGood, Faith and Finance, is a new movement that explores the implications of faith traditions for finance, economics and entrepreneurship. Mark Sampson has written this piece, exploring the need for economic theology.
In this piece from Religion News Service, Mark Elsdon describes Pres House's ability to combine church owned property, denominational impact investment, and a mission approach to create a thriving ministry and sustainable financial model.
Mark Elsdon shares some thoughts on non-profit growth and leadership in a series of blog posts through Princeton Seminary. The first one is here:
This article describes how Mark Elsdon, Executive Director of Pres House, and his team transformed a dormant organization into a nationally recognized campus ministry that generates more than $2 million in annual revenue.
Based on his doctoral work at King's College London, Mark Sampson explores the connection between social enterprise and gift-giving with Shari Oosting of Princeton Theological Seminary.
Demonstrating the theological framework behind how RootedGood conceives of social enterprise, this article explores the promise and peril of missional enterprise and creating new ways to combine missional intent with enterprise models.
This broad-ranging interview with Shannon Hopkins explores the story of Matryoshka Haus and the role of design-thinking and gamification in the creation of the tools and products available through RootedGood, such as Mission Possible.
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