Birmingham’s Passport receives $750,000 grant

Birmingham-based Passport Inc. received the largest donation in its 19-year history in the form of its first freestanding grant for its new program Echo Initiative.

“Christmas came early for our office this year,” said Passport President David Burroughs. “We are very excited about the ability to implement the carefully crafted vision that this grant makes possible.”

The $750,000 Lilly Endowment grant will enable the ministry originally conceived as a summer camp for students in grades 6–12 to produce needed resources it cannot currently provide, said Colleen Burroughs, executive vice president of Passport and wife of David. David and Colleen Burroughs co-founded Passport while they were both still in seminary.

The Echo Initiative, which refers to God’s call as a repeated sound throughout a Christian’s life, will seek to broaden the conversation of call beyond paid vocational ministries to reach into the daily lives of children, youth and adults. It will produce tangible resources such as Vacation Bible School and retreat materials designed around the question “How can I be a minister as a follower of Christ today?”

The initiative will include three phases:

• An education initiative will produce resources for children, youth and adults designed to be flexible enough to allow for varied settings but cohesive enough to connect the conversation of God’s call over time.
• An empowerment initiative will include training of college-aged leaders for annual Echo events for youth and minigrants for practicum experiences through PASSPORTexpeditions, a program that provides students with individual opportunities around a specific interest like ministry to victims of sex trafficking or addressing poverty through Passport’s Watering Malawi well-drilling initiative.
• An encouragement initiative will provide professional development support for youth ministers both to reaffirm their personal vocational calls and to cultivate a culture of calling with students in their ministries.

The Echo Initiative is particularly interested in offering the new resources in Spanish and is working out relationships to enable not only word-by-word translation from English but also considering cultural context, Colleen Burroughs said.

(ABP, TAB)