At Imago Dei, two of our core values are humility and curiosity — rooted in the recognition that we don’t have all the answers and have a lot to learn from our partners, the communities they serve, and our peers. A learning posture feels more important than ever given the tectonic shifts in the landscape: the rise of authoritarianism, restrictions placed on civil society, and government funding cuts leaving nonprofits around the world reeling from escalating community needs and dwindling support. As we undergo a strategic planning process this year, we are identifying key lessons and insights gained over the past three years. We are intentionally building that learning into our emerging strategy for the next three years. So what stands out? Here are four key takeaways shaping our emerging strategic plan.
1. Addressing the Roots of Women’s Inequality Remains Our North Star
Women and girls around the world face a range of interconnected barriers that are deeply engrained, mutually reinforcing, and resistant to siloed solutions. At Imago Dei we believe that lasting change requires investing – relationally, flexibly, and long-term – in a healthy ecosystem of locally-rooted leaders working collaboratively to address these barriers. This means engaging men, women, boys, and girls alike and bridging faith and non-faith actors to shift the social norms that drive injustice and limit human flourishing.
In 2025, we published Good Faith Approaches to Gender Equality, documenting the transformative impact of locally-led approaches engaging faith leaders and communities to shift social norms that are harmful to women and girls. This report, informed by grantee partner case studies, affirmed our overall theory of change. Going forward, we are articulating more specific and intentional strategies for advancing this work in each of our focus geographies. By doubling down in our long-standing geographies, we seek to deepen grantee partnerships, expand ecosystem-wide learning and collaboration, and catalyze meaningful impact for women and girls.
2. Responding to Challenges in the United States
Increasing division, hostility, and dehumanization of “the other” in the United States — including in places of worship — has deeply impacted our grantee partners. In response, we feel compelled to do more domestically to advance faith-rooted peacemaking and civic engagement that defends human dignity, advocates for the common good, and supports a healthy democracy.
Our partners and advisors are challenging us to consider how we can do more in this season, not just in Boston but across the United States. Through our Frontier Fund, we are actively exploring what is “ours to do” in this complex field. Learning from this work is informing an emerging funding strategy focused on the intersection of faith, peacebuilding, and civic life in the United States. Our goal is to support a set of organizations that are working at both the local and national levels to advance a Christian witness that is rooted in the imago Dei – the way of peace, justice, mercy, and love of neighbor.
3. Investing More in Grantee Partner Wellbeing and Resiliency
Feedback from our grantee partners has been consistently positive around our relational approach, multi-year unrestricted grantmaking, and focus on wellbeing — or “keeping the spark alive,” as we say. With the ongoing disruptions in the world, partners have communicated their need for more support, both financial — in the face of reduced government funding and gaps in community access to basic goods and services — and non-financial, as the stresses and strains mount for staff and the communities they serve.
In response, we pivoted quickly in 2025 to release additional Keep the Spark Alive funds and targeted emergency grants, reinforcing our commitment as a spend-down foundation. We did not want to sit on our assets in what was and is a burgeoning polycrisis. We also doubled down on leadership development, staff soul care and wellbeing, organizational resiliency, and peer connection among our grantee partners. Looking ahead, we intend to continue to structure enhanced opportunities for soul care, capacity strengthening, and deeper connections – all in support of grantee partners maintaining healthy organizations and realizing their full potential.
4. Leveraging Our Communications Capacity in Defense of Human Dignity
In our last strategic plan, we invested in a dedicated communications capacity for the first time. With our communications manager leading the way, we upgraded our website, strengthened our brand, and leaned into communicating our core values, our approach to philanthropy, and most importantly, the vital work and impact of grantee partners.
This investment has paid off — and there are more opportunities ahead to bring our partners’ voices to the fore in promoting our shared humanity and ways of investing well in women, girls, and overall human flourishing. This feels especially important at a time when shared values around the inherent dignity and worth of every human being — the imago Dei — are increasingly being called into question. Going forward, we will look even more proactively for opportunities to raise our voice and stand up for human dignity in a time of increasing dehumanization.
As we look ahead to the next three years, we know we can’t do it alone. Even as we strengthen our team, we’ve learned to lean on a dense web of external collaborators — from advisors and grantee partners to peer funders and leaders in the social impact and nonprofit sector — to enable greater impact in line with our mission. We remain curious and in active learning mode as we finalize our 2027–2029 strategy, knowing we’ll need to refine our plan regularly as we continuously learn and adapt to an ever-changing world.
