Helping Catholic Youth Ministers Thrive!

A collaborative, creative, and community oriented training event for your adult leaders!

The most important ingredient in a healthy and effective youth ministry program (other than Jesus), is your team of adult leaders...

Leader Lab creates an opportunity for you adult team to grow as leaders, build community together, create better ministry opportunities, have a ridiculous amount of fun, and pray with one other. There's no lectures or boring workshops – Leader Lab is built on the Thriveanooga conflab model.

What's a conflab?

"The conflab model that allowed for real expertise to be engaged and shared was perfect. Not once did I find myself being talked at or unseen. This experience was intimate and wonderful."
Carol Wiget – Diocese of Birmingham
The conflab model is COLLABORATIVE.
It's not about big name speakers or flashy videos, the biggest asset of the conflab model is your team. Every person who comes has their own skills and experience, so we leverage that for everyone's benefit.

Instead of a keynote or a lecture, conflabs are collaborative sessions where we'll work together to create action-oriented solutions to your real world ministry problems. It's all about learning from and challenging each other.
The conflab model is CREATIVE.
Conflabs aren't about cookie cutter solutions, we're ready to push the envelope, challenge conventions, and dream up creative and innovative solutions that are unique to your ministry context. To make that possible, each conflab session gives time and space for creative thinking and group brainstorming.
The conflab model is CROWDSOURCED.
Your ministry context is unique – and so are the conflab sessions we lead for your team...

Rather than us coming to you with prebuilt content, conflabs are built around what you and your team want to talk about. Topics are collected from each of the participants ahead of time, allowing us to custom build sessions based on that crowd sourced material.
The conflab model is COMMUNITY-ORIENTED.
We believe in the importance of community – especially within your leadership team. With that in mind, we use conflabs (and other elements during Leader Lab) to build community, trust, and camaraderie among your leaders.

We'll also help you facilitate pre-event and post-event conversations with your team so the dialogue and community are ongoing.
The conflab model is CONSTRUCTIVE.
Throughout our Leader Lab event, we will be building innovative solutions together. Your team will be able to take back these solutions and implement them in your ministry right away and make real change (we're not just talking theory).

We keep it practical, relevant, and action oriented.

How does it work?

BEFORE THE EVENT
Our team works with you to create pre-event conversation and collaboration. We also create for you an online survey you can send to your leaders – allowing us to collect information about the team, your ministry, and your unique needs. These surveys and pre-event conversations help us create a custom built for your team.
DURING THE EVENT
A Leader Lab facilitator (most often it will be Michael Marchand, President of ProjectYM) will travel to your area for the event.

You'll need to provide the venue, the lodging, a priest (for Mass), and the food – we'll take care of everything else.

The exact schedule of the event can be flexible, but we recommend starting around 6pm on Friday and finishing with lunch on Sunday.
THE COST
In order to make this an easy sell to your pastor/supervisor, we've bundled everything together for only $4,000. This includes all travel expenses and conflab materials.

The cost is the same regardless of the size of your group, so parishes are able to partner with other parishes in the area to split the cost (and run Leader Lab as a multi-parish event).

There is a $2,000 non-refundable deposit due to reserve the date for your event.
THRIVE PRO BONUS!
Because we believe in the importance of ongoing support and formation (and because we want to be in it with for the long haul), the Leader Lab packages includes one full year of Thrive Pro for the sponsoring parish!

How do you sign up?

The heart of our ministry is investing in and supporting parish youth ministry programs, so we would LOVE to talk with you about bringing Leader Lab to your parish!

If you'd like to talk with us about partnering with your parish, email us at the address below or (even better) schedule a conversation with Michael.
SCHEDULE A CONVERSATION
Made by Michael Marchand