Join us at Karam Forum 2022 this November 17-18! Helen Young Hayes will share her revolutionary experience leaving the heights of Wall Street to start a business in Denver that hires former convicts and others on the margins who need a path into the workforce.
Take nine minutes to watch Hayes’ amazing story:
Amos Yong, Denise Daniels, Michaela O’Donnell, Fernando Tamara and more will also lead our collaboration, with a focus on Thriving in a Changing World.
We’re looking forward to gathering with you to reaffirm, reimagine and refresh our vocations as theological educators – collaborating to seek new life for ourselves, our students, our schools and our communities.
Gather with us LIVE in Denver, OR join by Zoom from wherever you are! You don’t need to decide ahead of time which way you’ll participate. Reserve your ticket today, and decide later whether you’ll join us in person at Park Church or via Zoom.
Check out our event website for details, including the schedule and FAQs.
We’ll start at 7:00pm on Thursday, Nov. 17, and finish up with lunch on Friday, Nov. 18. So if you’re attending either ETS or AAR/SBL, Karam Forum is a super-easy addition to your trip.
Members of Karam Fellowship get discount admission to Karam Forum. Find out more and join the Fellowship to enjoy great benefits, like a subscription to our peer-reviewed journal Faith & Flourishing, and support our work as we help you build the future of theological education.
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If you were with us at Karam Forum 2020 in Atlanta, you’ll remember Refuge Coffee. We met founder and CEO Kitty Murray, and heard about how Refuge provides job training and mentoring to the large population of refugees settled in the Atlanta area.
Businesses like this are on the cutting edge of the new movement emerging in the church to bring genuine economic flourishing to the world, transforming the way a culture treats people. As Element 9 of the Economic Wisdom Project’s Twelve Elements of Economic Wisdom puts it: “The most effective way to turn around poverty, economic distress, and injustice is by expanding opportunity for people to develop and deploy their God-given productive potential in communities of exchange, especially through entrepreneurship.”
That’s why we’re honored Helen Young Hayes and Denise Daniels will take the stage at Karam Forum 2022 to explore how these kinds of new businesses emerge, and what the church can do to support and cultivate them.
If you look up Hayes on Wikipedia, you’ll learn that she is “an investment fund manager best known for her success in running the Janus Worldwide Fund and Janus Overseas Fund.” That by itself would be quite a resume for anyone. These investment funds are among the world’s largest, so their impact on the global economy is enormous.
Keep reading that Wikipedia entry and, buried at the bottom – if you blink while you’re reading, you might miss it – you’ll see that “Hayes now owns Activate Workforce Solutions, a company that mentors underutilized workers.” By moving people from the margins to sustained economic mobility, ActivateWork creates what it calls “triple wins for job seekers, employers and the community.”
Hayes’ bio at ActivateWork places the company’s mission in cultural context:
The daughter of Chinese immigrants, Helen is a believer in and the embodiment of the American Dream. But the American Dream – a life of flourishing – is elusive, as generational poverty becomes the default for too many men and women from underrepresented populations. ActivateWork bridges the gap between individual potential and realized success by matching and placing individuals into self-sustaining careers and through intensive coaching of personal, professional and financial skills. ActivateWork seeks not only to advance economic and professional success but to transform lives through the learning and mastery of new habits, mindsets and disciplines.
The Karam Forum Dream is that you’ll join us and be part of the collaboration as we learn together how we can cultivate a church with more ActivateWorks in it!
We also have plenty more in store, including:
Amos Yong will give our keynote address, on how our schools can find new opportunities amid the challenges of digitalization, globalization and pluralization by relying on the Holy Spirit. Discussion will follow with Fernando Tamara, Philip Thompson and more.
Michaela O’Donnell and Meryl Herr of Fuller Theological Seminary will lead a collaboration focused on our own formation as educators facing these challenges. It’s not just our schools that face unprecedented challenges – it’s us! How can we find life-giving renewal in our tumultuous vocational circumstances?
Kara Martin of Alphacrucis College continues to lead our annual Global Session, in which colleagues from around the world join us via Zoom. We always discover rich insights by hearing about what the Holy Spirit is doing among our global peers in theological education. This year we’ll feature colleagues from Africa and South America.
And Jeff Hoffmeyer of the Denver Institute for Faith and Work will introduce us to local ministries embodying the mission of God in Denver. Wherever Karam Forum goes, we’re always honored to yield the stage to the people who are building the future of Christian community and mission on the ground in those places.
Register today to join us LIVE in Denver, OR by Zoom from wherever you are!
