Meet our SENT 2020 Presenters
Each year, NBA’s Incubate initiative hosts the SENT Seminar. This seminar equips Social ENTrepreneurs with the tools they need to run successful nonprofit organizations and other social enterprises. The three-day seminar is designed for Disciples-affiliated leaders and leadership teams who are starting new health and social services ministries.
SENT covers the basics of nonprofit ministry startups, and skills for leadership and innovation across inter-connected, cross-cultural, and faith-based communities. Due to the global health crisis, NBA has adapted its traditional SENT model and moved the seminar to online only. Participants will be joining us from across the country for a series of virtual sessions that will provide the same powerful learnings our in-person event of years past have.
The 2020 SENT Seminar will take place from Wednesday, September 16 to Friday, September 18. We invite anyone who may be interested in this multi-day learning opportunity to register for this virtual event by Wednesday, September 2. You can register here.
In addition to the work of NBA staff that make this event possible, we are grateful to our lineup of esteemed presenters who will share their knowledge with our SENT participants this year. Get to know them below!
Rev. Darnell Fennell, presenting “Developing Your WHY”
Rev. Darnell Fennell has extensive nonprofit management experience and a track record of planning and leading initiatives that have consistently flourished. He is the founding and executive pastor of Just Love, a new Disciples church whose members are advancing intersectional justice in Houston, Texas. In addition to his role as executive pastor, Fennell serves as the Director of Social Entrepreneurship for NBA. In this role, Fennell supports NBA’s efforts to equip and support Disciples who are starting innovative, forward-leaning ministries of compassion and care in their own communities.
Rev. Nora Jacob, presenting “The Church and Social Impact”
Rev. Nora Jacob serves as Acting Executive Director and Restorative Justice Director of the nonprofit UrbanMission Community Partners (UMCP), an NBA Affiliate Ministry in Pomona, CA. As a former new church ministry co-planter as well as one of UMCP’s co-founders in 2015, Nora’s UMCP work spans several areas of social entrepreneurship including grant-writing, fundraising, and collaboration-building.
Dr. Jennifer Madden, presenting “Developing a Business Plan”
Dr. Jennifer R. Madden is president of Leverage Point Development. She is a strategist, researcher, teacher, facilitator, and design thinker providing strategic planning, resource development, technical assistance, and capacity building. Dr. Madden is a Nonprofit Management Research Fellow, a Fowler Sustainability Fellow, and a Management Design Fellow. Her research is on designing effective cross-sector partnerships then leveraging those collaborations to build capacity for effective performance and social innovation. She is passionate about urban economic development, solution finding, bringing ideas to fruition, and training the next generation of innovative design thinkers (and change agents) for system-level change and positive deviance.
Rabbi Elan Babchuck, presenting “Fundraising 101”
Rabbi Elan Babchuck is an entrepreneur and spends much of his time exploring the rich intersections between the two traditions, and the abundant possibilities therein. He is the Founding Director of Glean Network, an incubator, and network for entrepreneurs who are building new models of faith in action, and Director of Innovation at Clal, a think-tank focused on the future of faith in America.
Carla Leon, presenting “Fundraising 201”
Carla is the lead for Innovation at the United Church of Canada. Carla has a background in for-profit having worked at Coca-Cola Canada, McCain Foods, and Canadian Pacific Railway. She founded and has been managing her own consulting business for more than a decade. She quickly pivoted the business into Small Business Solver, a leading pay-what-you-can small business resource used worldwide including in hundreds of communities in Canada.
Amanda Hundt, presenting “Communication Strategies”
Amanda Hundt is an experienced designer and marketer based in Boise, Idaho. She has an extensive history in corporate marketing in the publishing, arts and crafts, and human resources industries. She received her Bachelor’s degree from the University of Idaho, where she studied Graphic Design, and her Master’s of Business Administration from Boise State University. Currently, Hundt serves as the Director of Marketing for NBA where she develops, manages, and executes all marketing and communication functions of the NBA.
Dr. Jim Herrington, presenting “Leading Change in Community”
Jim Herrington has been a pastor for 45 years and served as a denominational executive, pastor to pastors, and a congregational coach since 1989. He has worked with hundreds of congregations from a variety of traditions around the challenges of personal and congregational transformation. He is the co-founder of The Leader’s Journey: Coaching for Wholehearted Leadership, where he and co-founder, Trisha Taylor, help leaders and organizations grow their emotional intelligence so that they can be the healthiest, most effective versions of themselves.
Linda Kay Klein, presenting “Developing a Pitch”
Linda Kay Klein is founder and president of the nonprofit, Break Free Together, and a personal coach dedicated to helping people release shame and claim their whole selves. This work was born out of her 15 years of research on religious trauma around sex and gender documented in her award-winning book, Pure: Inside the Evangelical Movement that Shamed a Generation of Young Women and How I Broke Free. Linda’s work has been featured by CBS, NBC and NPR.
Rev. Dr. Dietra Wise Baker, presenting “Advocacy and Activism”
Rev. Dr. Dietra Wise Baker is a Visiting Professor of Contextual Education and Community Engagement and the Director of Contextual Education at Eden Theological Seminary in St. Louis, Missouri. She is organizing the “Break the Pipeline” campaign aiming to dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline in Missouri. In August 2014, she became the clergy caucus co-leader of the Gamaliel Networks’ (47 affiliates in 17 states) Metropolitan Congregations United (MCU), an organization that resourced clergy and congregations in the early stages of the Ferguson movement. In her work with MCU they lead over 300 congregations in conversations about race. Dr. Baker is certified anti-racism trainer for the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), and a trainer of faith-based community organizing in the Gamaliel network.
Rev. Taj Smith, presenting “Social Service vs. Social Justice”
Taj M. Smith is a preacher, writer, and advocate working at the intersections of faith, justice, and identity. He has preached throughout the Boston-metro area on radical love, racial justice, and transgender liberation. Taj worked on the YES on 3 campaign in Massachusetts as the Faith Organizing Director, the first campaign to protect transgender rights by statewide election. He is currently the Assistant Director at Glean Network, working at the intersection of faith and social innovation. He received an MDiv from Harvard Divinity School in 2016.
You can download a this list of speakers and their bios here.
