Restore OKC is a community development organization in Oklahoma City. They’re “focused on the restoration of health, environment, reconciliation, and equity with neighbors in Northeast Oklahoma City.” For the past 6 years, Restore OKC has been committed to building relationships with the people in their community and working alongside them to bring about transformation.

As the organization has grown, they have had opportunities to develop new ministries. Through this process, they also began to recognize areas where they wanted to make improvements.

Making Improvements

In the Spring of 2022, Life.Church sponsored a team from Restore OKC to join the Innovate course at Chalmers. This course provided the opportunity for them to assess how they could strengthen their programs.

Innovate is a program that helps teams develop new ministries or strengthen existing ministries by laying a biblical framework for poverty alleviation and drawing from best practices in community development and easy-to-use innovation and design thinking tools. Over the course of the program, participants learn to apply 21 innovation tools and 20 ministry design principles to a challenge they are facing in their own context.

When the team from Restore OKC enrolled in Innovate, they wanted to explore how they could better engage with their grocery store and market employees who were involved in their life skills training classes.

Sara Hawk, one of the Innovate team members, explained, “What came out of that reevaluation of what we’re doing was an orientation that allows us to bring in our market employees who aren’t here at our office to see our day to day, every day, get an introduction to Restore OKC who we are, but also who we believe God is, who we believe he can be for all of us and invite them into the process of dreaming with us for long term change.”

How You Can Innovate

Enrollment for the spring Innovate training is open, and you’re invited to join with teams from around the world in exploring how you can make improvements in your ministry that will help your community flourish!