Since the industrial revolution, food and agriculture systems have created an unprecedented abundance of options in prosperous markets. However, we occasionally see the vulnerability of these systems, from their dependence on geopolitical stability to their toll on global health.

We're interested in ventures looking at pragmatic, systematic changes in the way the world eats.

The greatest opportunities for social impact in developing contexts will come from infrastructure that allows for more infrastructure— systems that encourage businesses to create jobs, health systems to provide a higher baseline of care, and governments to root out corruption.

We're interested in ventures with a scalable view of infrastructure creation—leapfrogging transitional Western systems in areas such as microfinance, banking, and health care.

Educational systems in America are under massive structural stress, from longstanding issues (teacher shortages, degree inflation, ballooning student debt) to the learning and social gaps created by COVID-19.

We’re interested in ventures building alternative services for learning and degree completion, as well as new “stamps” that certify skill development, character, reliability, and attitude. These could help create pathways to social opportunity, alleviate debt, and reward responsibility and creativity.

In the wake of COVID-19, which has amplified and accelerated the heartbreaking trend of deaths of despair, we’re interested in ventures building creative solutions to addiction and its aftermath.

We believe the most essential ingredient in addiction intervention and care is accountable human community, which can be facilitated in various ways, including through the application of data-driven predictive technology.

Refugees and immigrants—among the "quartet of the vulnerable" who are lifted up in the Bible—face some of the most disorienting experiences possible.

We're interested in ventures that help individuals and families going through these experiences, including transition safety, job provision, shelter, education, and balancing the goals of preserving cultures of origin while integrating into new ones.

The American justice system is one of many areas where the poor and marginalized fail to experience our society as ethical and just. As Bryan Stevenson has said of it, the hard truth is that too often, defendants are better off being “guilty and rich than innocent and poor.”

We’re interested in new ventures that help address issues in education, courtroom representation, and access to quality, affordable legal services.

Human trafficking is the most extreme example of Mammon-based exploitation: turning people into things for monetary gain.

We're interested in ventures taking creative and often aggressive approaches to reshape supply and demand economics as well as legal and reputational consequences, making it difficult for financially motivated actors and their customers to consider participation in trafficking as viable.

Downstream from the breakdown of the nuclear family and other social trends is another breakdown—of the adoption and foster care systems.

We're interested in ventures building new paths forward with a child-first design ethos and scalable interventions that can affect this broader challenge.

For centuries, African-Americans have experienced the theft of legitimate opportunities for wealth, truth, and power. Though great progress has been made toward our country's founding promise, the legacy of this history continues today.

We seek organizations creating pathways for voluntary acts of reparation, in areas such as real estate development, fund structures, capital and ownership access, media, and more.

The American healthcare system is infinitely complex, with an often exploitative system of misaligned incentives that prioritize financial outcomes over health outcomes.

We are interested in ventures working all along the healthcare spectrum—with opportunities from wellness and root causes of disease, to reducing administrative costs, to pioneering new tech for healing, to protecting the poor from catastrophic health risks and lack of access.

Accelerated by the pandemic, we are experiencing a massive shift in how certain kinds of work are done—changing expectations about the definition and meaning of work itself.

We’re interested in ventures bringing a human-centered perspective on this evolution, creating systems that take into account healthy amounts of screen time and in-person time, new pathways for professional development, and even living situations for remote employees.

Certain structures for placing investment capital have driven innovation while creating inordinate pressure upon startup teams and investors to overstate impact and minimize vulnerabilities.

We’re interested in new investment mechanisms that mitigate this unproductive pressure without sacrificing execution and excellence. Solutions may include new debt mechanisms, capital pooling, or "permanent capital" approaches.

The rewards to a successful founding team can be far greater than those offered to the next few people on the payroll, who often bear similar risk. We believe more founders should see their equity as a generative opportunity to bless others adjacent to the venture.

We're interested in ventures with a different vision for their cap tables. Such a generous rethinking of ownership could also deescalate some of the larger tensions in our society today. We see particular opportunities to use new models and old alike, from co-ops and ESOPs to DAFs, DAOs and NFTs.

Few vocations offer the same opportunities for ownership upside and multi-generational wealth creation as entrepreneurship. However, entrepreneurs who fit a particular profile are most likely to have access to opportunity and resources to grow their enterprise.

We're interested in ventures that see access to entrepreneurship as a viable and critical activity for talented and ambitious people from all communities. They provide opportunity to those excluded from financial and social-capital networks that often go back generations.

A creeping “workism” crushing American workers, and the “great resignation” is well underway among those looking for good jobs at all levels of the economy—whether defined in terms of stability and provision or flexibility and work/life balance.

We’re interested in ventures with good work as a core reason for being—supporting the underemployed, offering group benefits and living wages when competitors don't, and providing training and internal opportunity.

Despite the United States’ ethos of philanthropy, and the proliferation of sophisticated charitable infrastructure and cause marketing, Americans still give an average of just around 2% of GDP to charitable causes.

We are interested in ventures thinking creatively about reducing “generosity friction” in people’s hearts, minds, and wallets to unlock genuinely sacrificial giving.

An unspoken premise of our age is that the ideal society would eliminate all suffering—including heading off the very existence of persons with disabilities early in the reproductive process. But we believe that the blessed life includes having persons in our midst who require special dimensions of care.

We’re interested in ventures activating new storytelling movements, employing those with disabilities, and working to protect all human beings in our communities from their conception to their natural death.

Despite media-driven preoccupation with the political sphere in the US, the next generation’s interest in civic engagement is waning. We need organizations to create vision and pathways for leaders who can contribute positively to the renewal of the public square.

We're interested in ventures using technology to engage the next generation, creative endeavors that de-escalate partisan warfare, and formation-driven, community-based approaches that put citizens at the center of the political process.

Ethnic and racial prejudice becomes entrenched over generations through economic exploitation, class warfare, and nationalism. So much of today's discourse on this topic lacks empathy, optimism, and grace—leaving us hopeless for the prospect of progress.

We’re interested in ventures bringing creativity and hope to these issues, creating cross-cultural journeys of learning and love that redraw the boundaries we have inherited from our broken past.

The Western Church is in crisis, particularly among the next generation, who are leaving the faith for reasons that, while often mistaken, are understandable. The Great Opportunity report suggests that over 40 million young people raised in Christian homes could walk away from a life with Jesus by 2050.

We see myriad possibilities for innovation, including cross-cultural economic and civic engagement, technologies and measurement for discipleship and spiritual growth, youth and academic formation, and redemptive applications of sound faith and work theology.

The “third wave” of the sharing economy is underway thanks to the blockchain, which will reshape many institutional structures. However, if the promises of Web3 are to be realized, privacy and trust must be addressed in deeper ways. Opportunities abound for collaboration, membership, portable identity, and property rights verification.

We’re interested in ventures where new economic software can power collaboration, membership, and portable identity—and can enable people to exchange or pool talent, assets, ownership, and voting rights.

There is great need for environmental innovations that care for the earth God created, protect against environmental risk, and bet on the human capacity for ingenuity and risk to solve great problems.

We're interested in ventures thinking creatively and optimistically about large-scale ways to shape our use of natural resources—to find breakthroughs in land and water use as well as wind, solar, and nuclear power that can open up possibilities for our collective future.  

By many measures, our society is more polarized than at any time in recent memory. Though we have more platforms for "engagement," we're experiencing breakdowns of community, relationship, and trust—or even conversation.  

We need ventures—from media to nonprofit services to faith-based outreach endeavors—building new approaches that center the conversation on love and mercy as much as on righteousness and justice, through new communities, frameworks, narratives, services, and resources.

Over the past decade, progress has been made uncovering systemic faults in the fashion supply chain, as many companies have reduced their dependence on “sweatshop” labor, and consumers have demonstrated their interest in understanding the sourcing of what they buy.

We're interested in ventures that continue this trajectory, increasing living wage employment and connecting buyers to a story deeper than their individual aesthetic preferences.

The stories embraced by a society both reflect and shape the spirit of the age. Today's diet of dystopian and dark stories not only suggest a prevailing mood of anxiety and hopelessness—they are also amplifying it.

We're interested in backing ventures and projects that are actively “re-presenting” the good, true, and beautiful in the world, making an artful and intelligent case for what the good life really looks like, and—if successful in their craft—reshaping and re-educating desire.

Millions of marginalized people still struggle with basic subsistence and safety at the bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy. As with all such basic needs, shelter is a category of great complexity, shortages, and resistance to innovation.

We’re interested in ventures taking non-traditional and holistic approaches to these issues, including areas like technology, materials, supply chain, governance, and business models.

A global pandemic made us acutely aware of our reliance on our local communities and their economies—and a global reckoning with injustice highlighted the geographical divides between classes and often ethnicities.

We’re interested in ventures that enter into the messy relational particularities of neighborhood issues such as generational poverty and gentrification, create new opportunities through public/private partnerships, community-focused spaces, thoughtful real estate development, job creation, and localized education.

Despite our society's encouraging progress in destigmatizing mental and emotional health challenges, it is clear we are in the midst of an epidemic of anxiety and depression—especially amongst our youth, who face a crippling combination of achievement culture and shame-based comparison culture.  

We're interested in organizations taking both “relief and development” perspectives on these challenges: not only more creative, effective, and accessible forms of traditional mental health support, but different kinds of schools, media companies, and technology firms that can address root causes and build resilience.

Nearly all personal technology involves trading depth and focus for the “superpowers” that tech delivers to us. Widespread adoption of these tools of communication has weakened the social infrastructure required for a common life.

We’re interested in technology applications that are “instruments rather than devices” (see Andy Crouch’s book, The Life We’re Looking For), enriching and enhancing our personal capacities rather than substituting for them. We want ventures creating new products that enhance the shared life of families, neighborhoods, schools, organizations, and society.

As AI is deployed to change the instruction codes of life—DNA and RNA—this ability will inevitably follow some vision of the good and seek to avoid some version of evil. But the ethical frameworks that are shaping biotech lack a “theological anthropology” that connects our view of humanity to what is ultimately true and good.

We’re looking for ventures shaped by a Christian vision to develop talent for these world-shaping and boundary-pushing fields, increasing the presence of Christian ethics where much of the future will be designed.

There are few things more devastating to the long-term health of society than war. Entire cohorts of individuals are destroyed, whether literally (through genocide) or psychologically (in the case of veterans and child soldiers); and the economic destruction can set countries back for generations.

We’re interested in ventures preventing war through peacemaking and disarmament, navigating the complexities of defense and cyberwarfare tech, and working in war’s aftermath in areas such as trauma therapy, education, and economic support.

More and more often, people are likely to be thought of and treated as consumers whose identity is formed through association with a set of brands.

Given this reality (which is with us for both better and worse), we'd like to support entrepreneurs building brands with a counterculturally virtuous and optimistic view of the world, spreading hope and beauty, eliminating stigma, and redirecting our identity away from materialistic consumption to lasting contentment.

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Capitalism has been incredibly effective at creating large amounts of usable square feet for certain purposes; yet we face considerable challenges not addressed by single-bottom-line models. These include a lack of affordable housing, environmentally taxing construction techniques, designs that fail to encourage relationships among households and neighborhoods.

We’re interested in real estate-driven ventures and projects that reimagine life together through place-based design and reinvent materials usage for sustainability and affordability.

At the root of so many of the social issues in our world is the vulnerable state of the family, from formation to longevity. Narratives and practices around dating, marriage,  parenting, and caregiving are changing radically due to social evolution, technology, and performance culture.

We're interested in ventures that advance the possibilities of forming and sustaining healthy marriages, deepen individuals’ connections to extended family and community, advocate and prioritize in-home caregiving, and develop covenantal practices of communication, wisdom, and courage as spouses, parents, and caregivers.