Grantmaking

Emergent Strategy

The Foundation uses two different but complementary strategies—Deliberate and Emergent—to make investments and grants designed to enhance connection, meaning, and purpose in the lives of young Jews.

Our Emergent Strategy aims to serve the majority of young Jews (estimated at 70%) who, as research shows, are not finding pathways to connect and engage meaningfully in Jewish life through the kinds of current communal offerings and initiatives we support through our Deliberate Strategy. The Emergent Strategy is focused on better understanding and designing for this majority population of Jews in the U.S.

R&D is an integral part of our Emergent Strategy. It involves research, testing and prototyping that enables the Foundation to best understand significant problems and promising new options for Jewish life and learning for this demographic. With this knowledge, the Emergent Team assembles new, unexpected, and expert talent who help us understand, design for, and test for our target audience. We aim to identify and support potential scalable solutions. Through our Emergent Strategy, we also work toward encouraging others in the field to adopt R&D practices and mindsets. We all benefit when we design for broad Jewish audiences, and build new Jewish futures together that are widely relevant and resonant for all Jewish people.

The Foundation implements its Emergent Strategy through a platform called Common Era—a sustained effort to source new talent and ideas, and to invest in new value propositions for Jewish life and learning.

Common Era works with researchers, entrepreneurs, builders, subject matter experts, and practitioners who are distinct from those who work on the Foundation’s Deliberate Strategy. By doing this, we both engage high quality talent who are often outside of current Jewish communal and engagement efforts, and utilize their expertise and perspective to work toward more thriving Jewish futures.

FAQs About the Foundation’s Emergent Strategy

When did the Jim Joseph Foundation launch its Emergent Strategy?

As part of a comprehensive strategy update, we launched our R&D direction and Emergent Strategy in 2020. We branded this work as Common Era in 2023.

Why did the Foundation launch an Emergent Strategy?

Research shows that many Jews are proud to be Jewish, but that a majority, estimated at 70%, is not currently being served by existing Jewish organizations, programs, and resources. The Foundation’s mandate is to support efforts that reach and meaningfully engage all young Jews. The Emergent Strategy provides an important and complementary balance to our Deliberate Strategy. It is expanding the Foundation’s ability to play an educational role for the broadest possible spectrum of U.S. Jews. Designing for and defining value propositions for new target demographics requires gathering new information, employing different approaches, and tapping into new expertise and knowhow.

Why is there a distinct Emergent Strategy Team working alongside, but separately from, the Deliberate Strategy Team?

To break the cycle of trying the same thing with the hopes of achieving different results, the Emergent Strategy sources new talent and ideas and utilizes an entirely different investment methodology to achieve its goals. This involves venturing beyond the current Jewish organizational landscape to network in new spaces, explore different offerings and experiences. The Emergent Strategy’s investments tend to be less vetted, riskier, and more explorative than those of the Deliberate Strategy, with the goal of achieving different results and outcomes.

We run experiments on the scale necessary to identify, learn about, and engage our target audiences. Common Era operates the Emergent Strategy and partners with wide-ranging talent so that dozens of new experiments can run at the same time. The Emergent Team brings fresh thinking by engaging best-in-class practitioners and researchers, most of whom are new to the Jewish communal space. The long-term outcome is to catalyze new offerings and experiences that this target audience will find engaging and meaningful.

How do I learn about experiments and learnings related to the Emergent Strategy?

Through the Foundation’s Research and Learning, we will regularly share relevant learnings from its Emergent Strategy research and work.