Lead Forward: a $350,000 grant program, with the digital home it deserves.

The Midwest Episcopal District of the AME Zion Church received a multi-year, $350,000 grant from Lilly Endowment to launch a leadership development initiative spanning five conferences: Indiana, Michigan, Missouri, Kentucky, and Tennessee. The grant funded four distinct initiatives, each with its own application process, scoring rubric, and program team.

A PDF program guide existed. A landing page existed. Neither was anywhere close to what a Lilly-funded grant program deserves — and neither could carry the operational load of running four concurrent initiatives across five conferences.

We built a complete grant ecosystem on Next.js and Microsoft Azure: a central hub page introducing the program, four initiative pages (each a self-contained mini-site with its own narrative, eligibility criteria, application process, and team), scoring rubrics surfaced publicly so applicants understand how decisions are made, downloadable program guides versioned alongside the site, and team profile pages for the leaders running each initiative.

The site is hosted on the same Azure App Service Plan as the rest of the district’s digital infrastructure — no new vendor contract, no surprise hosting bill, no parallel ops surface area to maintain. The district owns the codebase outright.

Lead Forward now looks as credible as the work it funds. Applicants reach a digital presence that matches the substance of the program. District leaders manage four concurrent initiatives from a single content surface. And the published rubrics have shifted applicant conversations from “what does Lilly want?” to “how does our work meet these specific criteria?”