10 Lessons Over 10 years: Jewish Teen Education and Engagement, Forever Changed

Over a decade ago, the Jim Joseph Foundation convened more than a dozen local and national funders of Jewish teen programming for a series of discussions on expanding teen involvement in Jewish life. We recognized that adolescents are a critical demographic and adolescence is a moment of inflection. Moreover, teens are holders of great insights and have the ability to articulate them and the realities they hope those insights can create. To paraphrase Joel 3:1, while those of us around the table had dreams, we knew it would be teens holding the vision to move us forward. We felt and continue to believe that teens are the futurists and optimists that our world needs.

These early conversations, which included teens themselves, taught us a lot — namely, how much more we still needed to learn. As a result, we commissioned groundbreaking research to identify and unpack strategies from both the non-Jewish and Jewish worlds are most effective in educating and engaging teens. This research ultimately gave us the knowledge to design responsive local teen initiatives in 10 communities across the country, under the banner of the Jewish Teen Education & Engagement Funder Collaborative. United by the shared aspiration of creating and nurturing contemporary approaches to Jewish teen education, engagement and growth, this new network of national and local funders and practitioners worked side by side with teens. Together, they reimagined the youth-serving ecosystem in these communities of varying sizes and demographic composition, with a commitment to sharing whatever unvarnished lessons they would learn.

Fast forward to today and the teen-serving ecosystem in the communities looks vastly different than when the Funder Collaborative started. New programs were incubated and unconventional partnerships took root. Scaling the most successful ideas was baked into the Funder Collaborative’s DNA; impactful programs launched in one community were adapted by others or brought to a national audience via the Funder Collaborative itself. In this way, the impact of the best ideas was amplified to reach hundreds and sometimes thousands of teens. This evolution was always the vision.

Now powered by Jewish Federations of North America (JFNA), the Funder Collaborative created an environment that fosters risk-taking, experimentation and ongoing reflection. Since becoming nested at JFNA, the Collaborative has offered six scaling masterclasses where Jewish professionals from more than 70 organizations learned about best practices and strategies for scaling, many with innovations successfully scaling across the country.

As the Foundation’s grants to these communities conclude, we are eager to advance this work in different ways. While our local partners on the ground continue to cultivate important relationships with an eye on sustainability, we want to share learnings for the benefit of the field at large. In this vein, we are excited to share “From Kedem to Kadimah: 10 Lessons from 10 Years of the Jewish Teen Education & Engagement Funder Collaborative”. Authored primarily by Sara Allen, executive director of the Funder Collaborative, and Rabbi Dena Shaffer, the Funder Collaborative’s director of education and learning, the lessons cover areas including how to hold space for both innovation and proven models; how best to collaborate and engage different audiences; the importance of mission clarity and leadership development; and how to build initiatives and programs designed to be sustainable; among others.

read the full piece at eJewish Philanthropy