Dan Vogel, Founder & CEO of Flourish Fund, is an Entrepreneur-in-Residence (EIR) with the Studio. Grounded in his experience building and leading Boston Consulting Group’s North American Foundation, Dan’s quest is to help large-scale faith-based philanthropy shape the major issues of our time. With Flourish Fund, he’s pioneering a new model for systems change, one that combines the strength of data-driven analytics, collective impact best practices, pooled capital, and redemptive innovation, with the goal of activating the body of Christ toward the protection of the most vulnerable. Flourish Fund’s first initiative is focused on the well-being of at-risk children and families before and inside the foster care system.
The Praxis team and Dan met in 2023, as he was just embarking on the due diligence and design process for Flourish Fund. Providentially, we were exploring our own redesign of the Studio at that time. We sought a new way to concentrate capital, domain expertise, and venture-building activity against each of our newly-defined Opportunities for Redemptive Imagination (ORIs)—a menu of several dozen “major issues of our time” where we believe the Church is called to offer creative and prophetic leadership. Foster care was one of the ORIs we had identified before we met Dan.
Through a series of design sprints and a mutual discernment process, we discovered that Praxis and Flourish Fund shared very similar passion for this issue—and complementary methods to address it. We invited Dan to become an EIR at that time, agreeing to partner on foster care as a proof of concept for both organizations—Dan seeking to aggregate and deploy large-scale philanthropic capital around an issue or sector; our team seeking to build a dense network of venture-building activity around an ORI.
We agreed that Praxis and Flourish Fund would co-convene a group of entrepreneurial Christian domain experts in the area of vulnerable families foster care in the United States.
This Foster Care Forum came together in January 2024 with a fascinating and generative multi-day session at Coram Deo, Praxis’s HQ building in NYC. The gathering featured Christian leaders of roughly a dozen organizations and coalitions working at the redemptive edge of the foster care system in the US. In addition to Dan representing Flourish Fund, this gathering included four Praxis Fellows: Charlee Tchividjian of Every Mother’s Advocate (ĒMA); Charles Daniels of Fathers’ UpLift; Mike Gallagher of 1MillionHome; and Pam Parish of Connections Homes.
We discovered that many of these organizational leaders, while they knew each other professionally, had not collaborated in meaningful ways, and certainly not with a mind toward entrepreneurship and innovation.
The first outputs from the Forum and surrounding gatherings (beyond the forging of new friendships and additions to our Summit community) were two documents. Praxis produced A Redemptive Thesis for Foster Care, co-authored by Praxis Partner Andy Crouch and Charlee Tchividjian of ĒMA. This thesis explores our joint take on the redemptive edge of this issue and suggests several opportunities for entrepreneurship and innovation. Its primary audience is founders, funders, and builders in the Praxis community and beyond; and the Praxis Studio will explore some of these opportunities as new venture ideas with future EIRs. Dan and the Flourish Fund team also developed their own thesis through Flourish: Children and Families Blueprint. It takes an analytic slant to the landscape, core issues, and opportunities in the sector, and is aimed at potential co-investors in Flourish Fund.
Charlee now serves as the Praxis Venture Partner for this ORI, leading our efforts to galvanize entrepreneurs and funders in our community (including Dan and Flourish Fund) around this issue, and to launch new ventures through the Praxis Studio. Dan continues as an EIR with the Praxis Studio as he grows Flourish Fund, aggregates philanthropic capital from sources far beyond the Praxis community, and deploys it through both mature and early-stage organizations.