The Building Blocks of Mission-in-Practice

I did some collaboration recently with my friends at Trinity Grace Church Williamsburg, to help them develop a number of "Community Renewal Projects," which were basically small-scale social impact programs that could be designed, launched, and supported from within the church, for the community.  I thought it was a great model, so I spent some time thinking about how to develop a framework that could help almost anyone launch a small-scale impact program in their neighborhood.

I'd done some previous work on this, developing a "Ministry Design Canvas," similar to the various typologies of Business Model Canvases and Value Proposition Development tools, and all of that.  But I wanted to simplify it, and optimize for coherence and comprehension.  So, it looks like this:

So let me give a few sentences on each of the 6 boxes.  The top three boxes have to do with designing the "concept" of your program and impact model, and the bottom three boxes have to do with the "execution" of your program.  The great thing about a canvas, like this, is that it's non-linear and non-sequential: you can start with whichever "knowns" you have, and work toward the unknowns.

1. Human

Who is this program for?  Can you name a specific person?  This is typical audience segmentation, trying to get a specific as possible about the beneficiary you are designing for.  This specificity is super important to move into any sort of empathy-mapping or need-identification, because if you're not focused the right segment, the insights and conclusions about their world are going to get blurry. 

2. Value

This is basic value proposition design.  This requires some "sensemaking," because what people value isn't always obvious, and in an impact-environment, it's not always as simple as "what they would pay for."  This takes some real work, to identify types of value that intrinsically energize and mobilize your audience.

3. Change

What's the imagined outcome?  Spending some time dreaming is usually good in a design space, to pull from people their latent expectations around what difference it will make.  Framing this as a before/after is really helpful, and opening imaginative, divergent space is good for creating excitement and buy-in.  Maybe the future really could be substantially better.

4. Resources

What do we have in our hands?  Do we have particular facilities, particular talents or giftings or skills among ourselves, or particular creative resources of some other type?  Without moving too quickly into constraints-thinking, it's helpful to start to map the "assets" available to you, especially the hidden ones.  There might be some surprises.

5. Partners

Who else might want to help?  When you identify the audience and the imagined outcome, it's not hard to zoom out a bit further, and find adjacent groups (whether completely values-aligned or not) who might also have a stake in seeing that outcome come to pass.  Finding adjacent partners is a great way to widen the resource base, and specialize your own resources.

6. Metrics

This is the space of measurement - what are we looking for to see that the change has happened?  I've found that using the language of milestones and celebrations is helpful here, and sustains good energy.  What you celebrate is what people aim for and what gets improved - so what will your program celebrate, that indicates you're making progress?

The projects turned out great - one focusing on supporting low-income single mothers in the neighborhood, another for increasing involvement with the New York City foster care system, another using their community space for free yoga and mindfulness classes, and another using music and sound engineering to help neighborhood teenagers produce their own rap songs.  Seeing the creativity here was great, and I think this could work in a number of different contexts.

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If you'd like to download the whole framework deck, shoot me an email here.