What?
The Garden needs to find a new space to continue its Sunday experience. Yet, before we start looking for new spaces, we want to dream together about how and what else The Garden might want to grow.
Thus, as part of The Garden Greenhouse Challenge, we are asking: Beyond the Sunday experience, how might The Garden foster sacred exploration, community, and positive impact in the world in a creative way?
We are hoping to Co-Create solutions that are:
Collaborative: Involves partnering with other organizations.
Innovative: Encourages different points of view and out-of-the-box thinking given the complex reality that we live in. Besides, The Garden has never been “normal!”
Sustainable: Prepares the Garden for the long-term, ensuring that additional expenses can be matched with revenue and solutions are “doable” given the size of the The Garden community.
Aligned: Keeps The Garden’s values of inclusiveness, spiritual growth, creativity, social equity, and outreach at its heart.
Why?
Recent studies show that people in today’s North American culture are increasingly searching for (1) the sacred outside traditional church, (2) community to stave off loneliness, and (3) ways to discover and live out purpose in the world. We believe that The Garden is uniquely equipped to fill a bigger gap in the Indianapolis community.
How?
A greenhouse harnesses light and energy to accelerate the growth of new plants. Similarly, The Garden Greenhouse Challenge will harness the ideas and energy of the Garden community, following an innovation process that brings together many voices and perspectives to co-create solutions.
The entire Garden community and representative voices from the broader community are invited, and needed, to participate.
Each of us has taken a unique path to find The Garden, and as such, bring a different perspective. “By leveraging diverse perspectives, co-creation opens the door to more innovative ideas” (Forbes).
By leveraging the collective set of voices, we can foster community-building while ensuring that solutions are aligned with The Garden. “Co-Creation creates joint value” (Image Think).
This ensures that we come up with better solutions that people really want. Sixty-one percent of businesses say co-creation leads to more successful products (braineet).
We will be guided through a four-phase innovation process:
Phase 1
Jan - Feb
Ideate
Engage with The Garden community to generate ideas that align with The Garden’s values and activities.
Phase 2
Feb-Mar
Prototype
Convert a few promising ideas into tangible forms that the community can interact with and provide insights and feedback.
Phase 3
Mar-Apr
Develop
Develop preferred ideas, using an iterative design and testing process with the community, narrowing in on the preferred solution.
Phase 4
Apr 14 +
Plan and Launch
Refine the preferred solution and develop an implementation plan.
Discovery Leadership Team - Roles and Responsibilities
Garden Volunteers
· Beth Young, GLT Chair
· Carolyn Scanlan-Holmes, Sr Pastor
· Dave Bradley, Garden volunteer, former PM
· Betty Brandt, Garden Staff
Participate in project planning and implementation, providing vision, insights, guidance, and oversight.
Consultants
· Rev. Dr. Brenda Freije, Attorney, Innovation Consultant, and INUMC Pastor
Work with the team to design and implement the innovation process, shepherding the process with the Garden Community.
· Stephanie Fernhaber, Butler University Professor, Innovation Consultant, Gardener.
Work with the team to design and implement the innovation process.
Launch Phase
· Jevon Caldwell-Gross, INUMC Church Development and INUMC Pastor
Provide leadership expertise and an important INUMC connection throughout the process.
· Amy Friedly, Creative Consultant
Provide visual communication design support.
Project Update as of March 9, 2025
Prototyping and Digging Deeper
As a result of our collective brainstorming efforts, we came up with 729 initial sticky notes and 101 “seed ideas!” These seed ideas were then grouped into 6 themes and 13 subthemes. Voting confirmed that there is interest across all of these sprouting strategies, and rough prototyping commenced.
We are now ready to dig deeper into 4 areas that emerged as having high potential for collaboration, innovation, sustainability, and alignment with The Garden. Please note that there are many other amazing ideas that can be integrated into these and/or explored in the future. In addition, we are ready to start exploring location options. To explore these topics, we are forming small work groups to research the following:
Fostering Belonging
Voting identified community building as the top choice. This topic is clearly important to the Gardeners and addresses larger topics such as loneliness and curating a sense of belonging. The initial prototyping uncovered the idea of creating some sort of platform or system to empower and facilitate gathering.
Spiritual Growth
A strength of The Garden is its focus on spirituality. There seems to be a growing demand for these types of opportunities, both within and outside The Garden. Seed ideas here ranged from a focus on nature, deconstructing troubling theologies, cultural awareness, and more. This group would explore the potential for spiritual classes, workshop, retreats, etc.
Activating Purpose
Several seed ideas and sprouting strategies pointed to the need for a process to help people identify their purpose, meaning, and contribution. For example, the “Third Phase” outlined the need to focus on individuals later in life and or approaching retirement. Other examples focused on younger ages and/or processes such as Wayfinders. Still others unveiled the need to focus on learning and creating a strong foundation.
Creativity & the Arts
There seems to be great interest and alignment with the development of some sort of multipurpose creative space. This has the potential to align with The Garden’s creative focus, serve a need in the community, and provide a source of revenue. Examples include offering space for rent for concerts, performances, events, coworking, music classes, recording facilities, and much more.
Exploring Physical Spaces
Given both The Garden’s existing Sunday needs and the potential for adding programs such as those listed above, it is time to start exploring physical spaces that might serve as an option for The Garden. This would include considering short-term spaces, as well as other creative options for leasing/partnering.
