Dan Vogel remembers the first time he introduced himself as the founder and CEO of Flourish Fund.
The group gathered at Praxis’s headquarters in New York City went around the room sharing their names and titles. Until a couple weeks earlier, Vogel had worked at the Boston Consulting Group’s foundation. Now, he was starting something new. Flourish Fund was a way for him to bring strategy from mainstream philanthropy and social impact into the Christian world, and put his own faith at the center of his work.
Sitting at his dinner table that night was Charlee Tchividjian, founder of Every Mother’s Advocate (ĒMA), a nonprofit that had gone through Praxis’s Accelerator in 2022. A pastor’s kid from South Florida, Tchividjian grew up alongside the foster kids her parents took in over about a decade of her childhood as they advocated for Christian involvement in the foster system.
As an adult, she became a foster parent herself, and her view of the system completely shifted when she watched the mother of the boys in her care lose parental rights in court. Once Tchividjian realized just how many kids end up in foster care for preventable reasons, she refocused her work on supporting mothers in crisis and preventing family separation in the first place.
As Vogel talked about his new venture and his vision for bringing catalytic funding around major issues, Tchividjian began thinking of how much help her field needed, and how Christian givers would have a heart for the work ĒMA does around mothers, children, and family unity.
She felt prompted to speak up: “I feel like the Holy Spirit is telling me that your first initiative should be foster care.” Though Tchividjian made the comment tongue in cheek, by the end of the two-day session Vogel did sense the Spirit leading him to focus on the foster system.
Six months later, they were together again for a foster care forum with around a dozen organizations in the field. Praxis leaders had realized that many people working on the same issues knew of each other but “had not collaborated in meaningful ways, and certainly not with a mind toward entrepreneurship and innovation.”
To Protect Vulnerable Children, We Have to See Their Parents
Praxis organizes around the major issues of our time, which we call Opportunities for Redemptive Imagination (ORIs). Within each, we see the possibility for alternative imagination—for Christians around the world to think differently and build accordingly.
So their collaboration began. Tchividjian pulled together foundational ideas to write a redemptive framework for child welfare, and Vogel grew Flourish Fund as a Praxis entrepreneur in residence. His team conducted deep research to hear from more than 100 leaders in the field. Flourish Fund has gone on to distribute nearly $2 million in grants to innovators working on this issue.
Rather than focusing only on recruiting foster families, as many Christians did early on, both zoomed out to look at how to make what Tchividjian calls “upstream and sustainable” reforms, from supporting biological and kinship families to better equipping foster parents to avoid burnout.
Vogel learned from Tchividjian’s story; her work with ĒMA helped him see the issue “in a whole different way,” he said, especially the church’s potential to keep families together before kids ever enter the system. ĒMA became one of Flourish Fund’s first grantees.
“It’s been very cool to see how it’s played out from that first showing up in that design session, knowing, okay, I’m basically here to work on Flourish Fund, but forging a friendship that’s now [led to] doing some really meaningful work together,” Vogel said.
Praxis has referred to influence as “friendship compounding over time” and challenged leaders to see unreasonable love, generosity, and relationships of blessing as means of bringing about deep change.
“Friendship is deeper than a cause,” Praxis Partner for Theology & Culture Andy Crouch said in a 2023 talk. “You will not sustain commitment to a cause through either failure or success. But the right kind of friends stick it out. They keep going. They just don’t stop calling each other to what they know the other is capable of.”
Anyone who has experienced the sustaining power of friendship, of true partnership, knows this firsthand. Friends sharpen each other’s ideas, extend each other’s capacities, and find purpose they wouldn’t have found alone.
Instead of forcing change by any means, the way of blessing trusts that patient, relational work can lead somewhere better. Crouch points to how Jesus models blessing by seeing people, naming them, and calling them into what’s possible.
“You will never be used by Jesus,” he said. “People say, ‘I want to be used by God.’ But you’ll be seen, named, and called by Jesus.”
This approach stands in contrast to viewing others transactionally, particularly in business and professional settings, where ego, competition, or just the way it’s always been done keeps people from looking for opportunities to bless others.
“You should be, at minimum, ambitious for the blessing of some other person beside you in the world,” Crouch said. “There’s no person for whom there is not someone, if not many people, for whom you are the most important gateway to the life that they’re meant for.”
For Tchividjian, that posture is built into how she sees the foster care system, looking for opportunities to bless parents, workers, and community members alongside the children at its center. It’s also essential to how she works in partnership with fellow organizations and leaders.
“We know that an organization like ĒMA alone could never possibly solve the foster care crisis,” she said. “This is not built on the back of one dynamic leader or vision. Building upon one another’s strengths instead of competing has been massive.”
Vogel describes Flourish Fund’s role as bringing together philanthropy, social innovators, the church, government, and nonprofits—a kind of “divine assembly” that can do more to move the needle than any one actor alone.
The process requires “different people, who have different giftings, different resources, different skills, and some intermediation, somebody who’s helping to put that together,” he said. “You put those pieces together and the Holy Spirit multiplies it, and there’s transformative results that could happen.”
Explore more about the way of friendship and blessing in The Praxis Course.
