Praxis | Redemptive Imagination Studio

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The Redemptive Imagination Studio is home to Entrepreneurs-in-Residence (EIRs) building their next venture, as well as regular sessions for Praxis community members to think, build, and create together at key inflection venture and vocational points.

At different times in history, creative groups have gathered to build together in ways that shaped the society around them, often advancing countercultural ideas and breakthrough innovations through dynamic relationships. Our vision is for the Studio to be one of these environments, rooted in a physical center in NYC that hosts the Praxis community.

We began Praxis because we believed it was vital for Christians to address the major issues of our time—and we believe it more than ever.

Since 2018, Praxis has prototyped programs and content to explore how to do this more directly through ventures. We’ve activated redemptive imagination at the earliest stages of venture formation, led design sprints with Portfolio ventures after their Accelerator program, and supported funders in building redemptive capital allocation frameworks.

During that time, we’ve worked in close partnership with founders to start over a dozen ventures. Our three most recent Studio-launched startups address caregiving, sexual exploitation, and digital discipleship. Collectively, these ventures—two businesses and one nonprofit—have raised over $25M in outside capital, including one we dreamed up with an innovative foundation and recruited a Founder/CEO to lead. Most importantly, they are well underway to shifting the norms and narratives of their respective issues.

The Redemptive Imagination Studio is a design and innovation studio for redemptive entrepreneurship that aims to discover and articulate the major issues of our time and creatively respond with venture-building, community-forming, content-shaping activity. Our initial list of 34 Opportunities for Redemptive Imagination (ORIs) acts as the organizing scheme for the Studio. Our gatherings include the following:

ORI Forums are focused on a single ORI, inviting leaders to learn about active projects in the sector, articulate an ORI Thesis, generate new ideas for ventures and content, and activate collaboration in our community.

Discovery Sessions are for members of the Praxis community who have founded and built transformational businesses and nonprofits and are exploring new ideas that may shape their future vocation or venture. Each 3-day, 2-night agenda is curated around a set of talks intended to generate multi-disciplinary insight around what Christians should build in the world.

Design Sessions provide Portfolio Fellows, Studio EIRs, and other builders in the community with a 24-hour whiteboard sprint with Praxis Partners to help design their strategy for an inflection point in their work as they tackle one of the major issues of our time.

Being an EIR in the Venture Lab was unlike any other startup formation process I've been through before. This is my third venture from scratch—but here I built the foundations of our venture by exploring the history, culture, and dynamics of caregiving, with a brilliant PhD scholar, a spiritual director, and expert mentors. It also played a significant role in my healing and intent as a founder.

Jessica Kim

Co-Founder & CEO, ianacare

2018 Venture Lab EIR

Praxis is an organic, thriving community of radical believers committed to restoring God’s vision for commerce in our present times—and it has been the catalyst for a growing movement of redemptive entrepreneurs throughout rural, marginalized communities in Asia.

Mel Murray

Partner, Global Community, Praxis

2016 Business Accelerator Fellow, 2019 Entrepreneur-In-Residence

Flourish Fund

Dan Vogel

2024 Entrepreneur-in-Residence

flourishfund.org

examples from the STUDIO

FLOURISH FUND

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. Flourish Fund’s first initiative is focused on the well-being of at-risk children and families before and inside the foster care system—which is one of the Opportunities for Redemptive Imagination (ORIs) we’ve identified as our creative agenda for the Praxis community. We partnered with Dan and Flourish Fund to host a gathering for Christian leaders in the sector (including four Praxis Nonprofit Fellows) and developed A Redemptive Thesis for Foster Care to guide entrepreneurial activity in and beyond our community..

case study

Sprout AI

Mark Sears

2024 Entrepreneur-in-Residence

sproutai.com

examples from the STUDIO

SPROUT AI

Mark Sears, a 2014 Praxis Fellow with CloudFactory, a large digital and artificial intelligence (AI) services venture, has recently launched Sprout AI Studio, a venture that starts ventures, partnering with visionary founders to build AI that amplifies genuine relationships and human flourishing in the digital age. Sprout’s design, thesis, and launch have resulted from collaboration between Mark and the Praxis Studio team from the start. He now serves as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence (EIR) in our Studio, building Sprout. He also serves as a Venture Partner leading our AI working group across the Praxis community, out of which he co-authored A Redemptive Thesis for Artificial Intelligence.
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case study