Our Initiatives

6 Million Lights Campaign’s two sponsoring nonprofits, The Illumignossi Project and OrLanu, have developed a wide range of initiatives, literally from cradle to grave.  All illuminate life’s journey with a goal of putting more light into the world. Some provide comfort and inspiration for life’s dark, challenging passages while others honor and celebrate life’s hallmark events. We’ve had 1,000+ lamp making participants, ranging in age from 3 to 104, including many with significant disabilities.  With a robust and resilient workshop process we have yet to have a participant fail to walk away with a beautiful lamp that then serves as a touchstone for the meanings discovered and intentions made during the workshop process.

While some of these initiatives can be used in our 6 Million Lights Campaign, we anticipate developing a range of new initiatives specifically for the 6 Million Lights Campaign, and these initiatives will be offered primarily online, accessible at the user’s convenience.  However, we’ll continue offering some initiatives live (in-person, on Zoom, or as hybrid experiences).

We invite other organizations to collaborate with us in the development of initiatives and welcome others’ expertise.  But no matter what the initiative, we can offer our take on the theme of light and how it can be integrated into various projects.  After all, we’ve had a lot of experience with this theme!  

The focus of the different initiatives may vary but all can be  integrated into the 6 Million Lights Campaign.  Each participant affixes a numbered label to their  lamp and participates in our 6 Million Lights registry.  Whether in private or in a group, our participants will have an opportunity to engage in ritual and ceremony to make their experience more meaningful.  Our participants will also have the opportunity to connect with the broader community of 6 Million Lights participants, because it’s through community that individual inflection points can lead to communal tipping points.

An example of an initiative that can be extended to 6 Million Lights is our “Light of Our Survivors” initiative.  Developed in 2020 as a transformative in-person workshop experience, we plan on adapting it as primarily an online educational initiative using curated, archival materials.  We can’t deny how powerful it was for participants from all faiths and backgrounds to make light alongside Holocaust Survivors and descendants while  learning of their stories and how they’ve found light in their lives despite the dark passage of the Holocaust. And we will continue to offer in-person workshops.  However, our goal is to make this highly impactful and important initiative available to as broad an audience as possible, and the only way to scale this effectively is to utilize online delivery of this educational material.

To learn more about the Light of Our Survivors initiative, click here.