State of the City Update: The A-Team
If you’re a college basketball fan, you know that this year’s March Madness tournament has lived up to its name and reputation as a handful of unlikely teams continue their mad march toward a coveted prize, the NCAA Championship and Waterford Crystal trophy.
As the giants have fallen one-by-one, leaving hearts broken and brackets busted, four schools remain with high hopes to tell the story of what can be when a team comes together. (For all the non-basketball fans, I hope you caught my throwback to a favorite childhood team, the A-Team.)
Keeping with the spirit of celebrating great teams, I want to introduce you to a very special team that is currently developing, designing, and driving the State of the City Project toward its completion. We’re proud of them and it’s our joy to celebrate each of them.
At the heart of the State of the City are more than one hundred volunteers who have hosted over six hundred conversations with neighbors, sixty interviews with faith leaders, and countless hours of behind-the-scenes efforts to navigate eight hundred pages and 320,000 points of research data. All of this is a highly collaborative effort to make the project informative, compelling, and actionable for you and your team, ministry, or organization.
Beyond the volunteers, we celebrate a handful of experts in their field including:
The Barna Group, a respected research powerhouse who has provided comprehensive research and expertise.
The Palau Association, who taught us why evangelism teams are essential for sustained movements of gospel saturation in a city.
Seed to Oaks, who helped us host successful neighboring listening tours.
Paul Pastor, senior editor, who works with the Eugene Peterson family, Christianity Today, Barna, Penguin Random House, and Zondervan.
Tyler Huckabee, copywriter, who spent ten years with Relevant Magazine.
Fruitful, a Metro-based design agency who is taking all of the data and discoveries to make them, well, beautiful.
Beyond this are the storytellers whose pieces will fill the project and our friends at City Hall, Omaha Public Schools, and University of Nebraska Omaha who are helping us better understand the real opportunities, challenges, and needs of this place we call home.
Finally, I want to celebrate the 35+ project partners who, through financial partnership, have made it possible for the State of the City to move from a dream that was drafted on a sheet of journal paper in January of 2020 to a landmark project that will be revealed this fall, 2023.
At Within Reach, we believe in teams and if not for those listed above, we’d never be able to deliver this comprehensive picture of what is true of our city today and a compelling vision of what can be when the people of Jesus work together so that the Omaha Metro might flourish.
With that said, I want to offer two invitations.
First, join us on April 27 from 11:30-3:00 at Life.Church as we welcome Barna to the Metro. Barna will lead your team through their research findings while helping you discover and apply outcomes in your leadership setting.
Second, if you haven’t joined us as a project partner, there’s still time. Step alongside more than 35 individuals, businesses, and churches who have made this project possible through financial generosity. Give online at withinreach.com/give.
We love being on the team with you!
Jed Mullenix
Within Reach // CEO