Research That Changed The Field
Reflecting on Effective Strategies for Educating and Engaging Jewish Teens
As the Foundation marks our 20th anniversary in 2025, we are pleased to elevate some of the individuals, organizations, and research that have left an indelible mark on the field over the last two decades.
What does it take to build a new field or significantly elevate a nascent one? Over 20 years, the Foundation asked this question on multiple occasions. Often, finding the answers started with research. In this feature (view other features here and here), Sara Allen, currently at Jewish Federations of North America, and Adam Smith, currently at JFS of Metrowest, look back on Effective Strategies for Educating and Engaging Jewish Teens: What Jewish Communities Can Learn from Programs That Work (2013), groundbreaking research that, along with talented and committed leaders, changed Jewish life and learning. We’re grateful to them for sharing reflections below.
When designing new Jewish education programs, a critical question to ask is how to design experiences around enabling teens to build meaningful relationships that will help them advance on their Jewish journeys. This emphasis on relationships built, rather than numbers of programs or attendees, may lead to entirely different methodologies for supporting Jewish teens to learn and grow Jewishly. - from 2013 in Effective Strategies for Educating and Engaging Jewish Teens
View ReportLed by BTW Informing Change and Rosov Consulting, the research showed that learning opportunities for Jewish teens at that time attracted less than 20 percent of the total potential audience. It was a clarion call, as noted in the report's opening letter, for new innovations in teen education, for greater collaboration within and among communities, and for funders to work together to make substantial, multi-year investments in the most promising strategies.
The researchers took the unique approach to conduct a program scan of Jewish and other universal and faith-based programs. Back then, Adam Smith, now Senior Director of Innovation and Community Engagement at JFS Metrowest, was executive director of the North Shore Teen Initiative, a new organization near Boston that sought to change the landscape for Jewish teen education and engagement.
This research really elevated the entire conversation around Jewish teens, why we should engage them, how we should engage them, and what success might look like. I think the first accomplishment of this report was to get buy in from leaders about what the challenge was in front of us all. The research was done with a level of sophistication that we hadn’t seen before on this topic. We began to ask new questions: How do you measure teen interventions? Can you quantify what different communities are doing? Can we assess episodic vs. ongoing engagement? Can you prove what’s actually working? – Adam Smith
The report highlighted successful models that utilized flexible participation, employed young and talented staff, leveraged organizational partnerships, had strong branding, and gave teens skin in the game, the central aspect of positive relations between teens and their peers and adults. The researchers wrote, "The sheer diversity of programs in this scan illustrates a fundamental lesson: no single effort could reasonably be expected to unilaterally address the challenge of Jewish teen education and engagement. "
Adam says there was major discrepancy between what teens said was most important and what many program providers were doing at that time. "What we take for granted now as integral to positive outcomes–having a charismatic leader, making sure that an event invitation comes from a peer–were revelations at that time."
The report’s concluding thoughts set the stage for major change:
Given this report’s focus on community-based approaches specifically, it will be critical to apply the lessons and implications from this research to the unique contexts of individual communities—thinking about their composition, needs, individual and collective interests, existing infrastructures, etc. Armed with the information generated by this research and with a comprehensive knowledge of those communities, we believe that national and local funders will be well positioned to partner with community-based stakeholders to consider new approaches to working in the teen sphere, with the ultimate goal of forwarding and deepening Jewish teens’ journeys.
Following this report, funding partners around the country embarked on a grand experiment, the Jewish Teen Education and Engagement Funder Collaborative.
Much has been written and shared about the Funder Collaborative. A couple of years after it launched, Sara Allen became its executive director. She came to the Funder Collaborative from NuRoots, an initiative of the Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles that engaged people in their 20s and 30s.
I knew that we needed to start engaging people at a younger age in different ways. By starting with “bright spots” of successful initiatives in this space, the research gave leaders in our field something to strive for. More broadly, this research was a road map that showed the power and impact that research can have. It catalyzed an entire field and compelled people to collaborate and align around shared values. It highlighted that there are different paths to accomplish shared goals and it was the driving force that brough nontraditional collaborators around a common table. – Sara Allen
Along with the Funder Collaborative, organizations like Moving Traditions, BBYO, RootOne, and others reflect much of the key insights and recommendations made in this report. Subsequent research led by The Jewish Education Project built on Effective Strategies and helped to advance the field even more, with measurable outcomes and a common language.
Since Effective Strategies’ release, Sara and Adam have worked closely together and recognize the instrumental role of this research.
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