Greenhouse

Greenhouses provide safety and cultivation for plants until they are ready to be planted elsewhere.  Our movement is like a Greenhouse - cultivating leaders and initiatives until they are ready to be sent out to the neighborhoods and the nations.  Our Greenhouse is made of three components: a network, a lab, and a residency.

Born in Aliquippa, Pennsylvania, The Greenhouse Network is a relational association of both missional leaders and missional plants who share common values.  The networks exists to:

●     Provide Relationship between missional plants for sharing resources

●     Provide Support for missional leaders as they discover their callings

●     Provide Access for new leaders to existing social and material capital

●     Provide Momentum for the regional multiplication of missional plants 

Missional leaders are continually identified, affirmed, mentored, coached, trained, championed, and supported as they respond to God’s call to the neighborhoods and nations. We cooperate with the Spirit in sending everyday people into their unique callings and assignments.

Missional plants are initiatives that are as diverse as the callings God has given missional leaders. They represent a relational network of non-profits, businesses, missional communities, and social impact projects that have sprung out of our shared relationships and values.  We partner with a local organization, the Greenhouse Lab, to multiply these initiatives.

Each day, our network is actively serving through a diverse community of missional plants that are making an impact in their communities.  Our leaders and plants support one another in prayer and relationship.  We encourage and help one another.  When possible, we learn together, worship together, and eat together.  We share our knowledge, wisdom, and when possible, our material resources with each other.  Mission is hard alone; its better when we’re together.

The Greenhouse Lab sits at the relational center of a grassroots network of leaders and organizations that has been serving Aliquippa and the surrounding region for 15 years.  This organic movement of organizations and social impact initiatives is defined by relational honor – championing one another’s successes and serving one another’s needs.  We believe this provides a solid foundation defined by quantifiable on-the-ground success as well as qualitative relational strength.  

The Greenhouse Lab has a physical presence on Franklin Avenue in Aliquippa, offering shared working and meeting space for leaders creating or serving missional plants.  The Lab offers a service platform to emerging leaders who wish to create new initiatives including financial services, marketing assistance, strategic planning, fundraising services, and training.  Participants will also be able to access mentoring and coaching relationships.  More importantly, the Lab’s physical presence gives access to a growing number of emerging leaders to an existing network of relationships, allowing them to build off of the relational strength and success of the already-existing grassroots renaissance taking place in Aliquippa.

The Greenhouse Lab gives access to emerging leaders who wish to participate in this burgeoning movement and can impart to them a way of doing community development that puts first the needs of the most vulnerable.  This success can be transferred even to other communities in time, many of which would benefit from their own unique version of this kind of grassroots movement.  While The Lab serves the network directly, it also serves leaders and initiatives that are not part of the network but wish to benefit from The Lab’s services.