Leading Edge piloted the first Employee Experience Survey for the Jewish nonprofit sector in 2016. This survey, which gathers feedback from employees about their experiences at work, has now been taken by 234 organizations in the Jewish nonprofit sector over the past four years. These organizations are using this feedback to ensure that their most valuable asset—their employees—are set up to succeed.
At the heart of the Jewish nonprofit sector is an innate desire on the part of 73,000 professionals to contribute to making the world a better place. These individuals are the engines powering the programs and services that strengthen Jewish communities and enrich society every day.
Are Jewish Organizations Great Places To Work? Results from the fourth annual employee experience survey, Leading Edge and Culture Amp, Fall 2019
Since its launch in 2016, M²: The Institute for Experiential Jewish Education has worked to advance, professionalize, and elevate the field of experiential Jewish education.
Many of M²’s signature programs bring cohorts of professionals together for many months to explore such concepts, the best known being their Senior Educators Cohort. In 2018, M2 received funding along with nine other educator training programs from the Jim Joseph Foundation to create professional development around “deep dives” into specific conceptual frameworks. The first was a Relational Learning Circle, for educators seeking to put relationship-building at the center of their work. After seeing this program’s success at engaging educators in bringing theory to their practice, M² decided to develop a Circle that would explore the application of other conceptual frameworks to Jewish education, as well as reach educators who might not have the ability to commit to a year-long program.
The Design of Immersive Experiences Circle consisted of three five-day seminars in March, May, and September 2019, offered as stand-alone experiences or in combination. Each drew upon a different field of knowledge to explore how educators can create and implement powerful immersive experiences, which M² defines as a “deliberately crafted educational experience where participants leave their home environment for a period lasting from two days to two months.”
As part of the evaluation work for the initiative, Rosov Consulting is producing a series of case studies of the peak moments–some form of intensive, residential, or retreat component–of each program. The second case study explores M²’s work in “The Architecture of Immersive Experiences.”
Building a Field by Bringing Theory to Practice: M²’s “The Architecture of Immersive Experiences,” Rosov Consulting, August 2019
On behalf of the Jim Joseph Foundation, the Center for Creative Leadership is conducting a cross-portfolio research study of leadership development in the American Jewish community to support Jewish learning experiences. The Foundation defines Jewish learning experiences broadly as “experiences that draw upon Jewish wisdom, values, practices, culture, traditions and history to engage people in activities that guide them towards living more connected, meaningful and purpose-filled lives.” The primary research questions guiding this study can be paraphrased as follows:
- How have Jewish leaders developed through opportunities and learning experiences?
- What are best practices for leadership development in the Jewish community?
- How can understanding the learning journeys of Jewish leaders and state of the art practices in leadership development inform strategies to achieve greater impact through investment in leadership development in the Jewish community?
This literature review represents our first step to exploring these complex questions by researching the distinguishing features of Jewish leadership and highlighting the current day challenges faced by Jewish leaders.
Cross-Portfolio Research Study: Literature Review on Jewish Leadership, Executive Summary, Center for Creative Leadership, May 2019
Read the Foundation’s series of guest blogs reflecting on the CCL literature review:
- A Path Forward in Jewish Leadership Development, Mordy Walfish, Leading Edge
- The Power of Leaders Who Leverage Networks, Stosh Cotler, Bend the Arc
- The “Crisis Narrative,” Revisited, Yehuda Kurtzer, Shalom Hartman Institute of North America
- Promote Dialogue: Next Steps as We Navigate Education Challenges in Training for Effective Jewish Leadership, Mark Young
- Polarity Challenges in Developing Jewish Leaders, Yavilah McCoy, Dimensions Educational Consulting
Phase One of the New York Teen Initiative (NYTI) has been a four-year, nine-million-dollar endeavor to redefine the New York City area’s Jewish teen engagement through the incubation of new and innovative models for summer engagement, a robust online marketing platform (FindYourSummer.org), and the provision of scholarships to participating teens and their families. The Initiative is part of a national effort—spearheaded by the Jim Joseph Foundation—in which 14 foundations and federations are working together as a Funder Collaborative to expand and deepen Jewish teen education and engagement in 10 communities across the United States. Over its first four years, NYTI has been jointly funded by UJA-Federation of New York and the Jim Joseph Foundation, with The Jewish Education Project serving as lead operator.
A team at Rosov Consulting has partnered with NYTI to evaluate the efficacy of this endeavor. This report explores NYTI’s ongoing and lasting impact on the programs it has incubated, their sponsor organizations, and the many teens who have benefited from these programs.
In its first four years, NYTI has introduced to the field of Jewish teen engagement a diverse array of programmatic approaches, concepts, and models, some of which are now being replicated by other program providers. It has supported the personal and Jewish growth of hundreds of teens, many of whom would not have otherwise connected to Jewish life. And it has promoted hundreds of Jewish engagement programs through the implementation of FindYourSummer.org.
Cracking the Programming Code: The New York Teen Initiative and Its Contribution to the Field of Summer Experiences and the Lives of Jewish Teens, Rosov Consulting, May 2019
In 2017, the Foundation simultaneously awarded three-year grants to ten different programs offering professional development of Jewish educators. Selected in the Foundation’s first ever competitive RFP process, these programs form a grantee cohort with a Professional Learning Community at its heart. The educators served by these programs include Federation professionals, early childhood directors, day school educators, Talmud teachers, and peer educators.
A team from Rosov Consulting is facilitating the Professional Learning Community and is also evaluating multiple dimensions of the professional development initiative. Rosov Consulting is examining who is being recruited to the 10 programs and their motivations for participation; the ways in which different programs work to develop their participants; and how participants grow professionally, and the outcomes of this growth for their respective fields.
As part of the evaluation work for the initiative, Rosov Consulting is producing a series of case studies of the peak moments–some form of intensive, residential, or retreat component–of each program. The first case study is of the JCC Association Sheva Center for Leadership Institute (SCLI), an initiative intended to build a pipeline in the field of early childhood education of prepared leadership.
Sheva Center Leadership Institute: A Jim Joseph Foundation Case Study, Rosov Consulting, November 2018
This study is animated by the vision that all Jewish teens in America will see their Jewish heritage as a source of wisdom, inspiration, and strength as they grow and discover their place in the world. Authored by The Jewish Education Project and Rosov Consulting, GenZ Now, Understanding and Connecting with Jewish Teens Today is the largest study of American Jewish teens ever conducted, with 17,576 teens participating. It deepens our understanding of the complexities of being a Jewish teen in the United States today.
Among the key headlines from the report:
- Participation in Jewish youth movements, youth groups and other organizations – collectively referred to as youth-serving organizations, or YSOs – measurably contributes to teens connecting to being Jewish, and to feeling good about themselves, their relationships, and their ability to make change in the world.
- Jewish teens get along with their parents and often reflect their Jewish values and practices.
- For Jewish teens, being Jewish is often about family, holiday celebrations, and cultural practices.
- Jewish teens share the troubles and concerns of other American adolescents, notably managing anxiety and depression, and coping with academic pressure.
Perhaps the most important message that communities and organizations can take away from this study is that youth-serving organizations are awesome. Teens who participate in a youth-serving organization (or at least the organizations studied in the report) score higher on almost every outcome measured by our researchers, including affinity toward Israel and behaving with the intention of making world a better place.
The findings of this report suggest an imperative to invest further in youth-serving organizations as a model for teen engagement, both to champion the invaluable work that YSOs are already doing, and to imagine new possibilities, including opportunities that appeal to teens who are underrepresented and not yet engaged.
GenZ Now: Understanding and Connecting With Jewish Teens Today, The Jewish Education Project and Rosov Consulting, March 2019
Access the GenZ Now data files from the Berman Jewish Databank.
Among the many ways in which the internet has irreversibly changed our lives is how it has enabled access to information with unprecedented speed and ease. By changing how we engage with information, it has also changed how people relate to information and how they negotiate its various meanings. Social media have accelerated this process by creating new ways to connect people through sharing information. These changes have influenced our communities, our politics, our consumption patterns, how we spend our leisure time, and even our definitions of “friend” and “like.”
Learning online does not look exactly like learning in classrooms or schools, summer camps or seminaries. Nor should we expect it to. And yet, people are learning online, and this report makes the case for understanding online engagements as educational. The question it answers is, “How are people learning online?” Combining leading research about secular online learning and new data about Jewish online learning, The Future of Jewish Learning Is Here offers a substantive, richly illustrative, and intimately informed account of Jewish learning online. It accounts for when, where, and how it happens, what people are learning, and how they are engaging with information alone and in relation with others. Jewish educational online media enable learners to:
Jewish educational online media enable learners to:
- Connect with others around Jewish learning
- Access Jewish knowledge beyond Jewish institutions
- Learn in sync with the rhythms of the Jewish calendar
- Utilize different platforms for different ends
- Integrate online learning and offline practice
Together, these key findings represent a portrait of Jewish learning online, with the understanding that learning online is more diffuse, less coordinated, more generally self-directed than learning in schools and other formal settings. The Future of Jewish Learning Is Here: How Digital Media Are Reshaping Jewish Education offers insights into how and what people learn online, as part of a larger conversation about what Jewish education looks like in the 21st century.
The Future of Jewish Learning Is Here: How Digital Media Are Reshaping Jewish Education, March 2019
(view as single pages)
Read a series of blogs in eJewishPhilanthropy on insights from the report:
- A Funder Approach to the (Seemingly) Limitless World of Online Learning, Josh Miller and Seth Linden, Jim Joseph Foundation
- Seek and You Shall Find, Eli Kannai, The AVI CHAI Foundation
- Hey Siri, Meredith Lewis, PJ Library
- A Bright Future for Jewish Education and Technology, Daniel Septimus, Sefaria
- Introducing the Future of Jewish Learning, Dr. Ari Kelman, Stanford University
Add comments and feedback on the report here:
This working paper released by The George Washington University Graduate School of Education and Human Development (GSEHD) and CASJE (Consortium for Applied Studies in Jewish Education) is the first report of a multi-year, comprehensive research project addressing the recruitment, retention, and development of educators working in Jewish settings in North America. “On the Journey” shares preliminary insights on individuals who work as Jewish educators today and by comparison with educators who either transitioned to administrative roles or left the field. Stakeholders focused on quality and impact of Jewish education across the country believe that attracting and nurturing talent is one of the greatest challenges today.
The multi-year research project, being conducted by Rosov Consulting, is funded with grants from the William Davidson Foundation and Jim Joseph Foundation. The concepts reviewed in the “On the Journey” report lay the foundations for additional analysis of relevant data on experiences of working educators, and for other parts of the study, which will continue over the next 18 months. GSEHD, CASJE, and the researchers welcome comments on the working paper, which can be submitted to Joshua Fleck, [email protected].
ON THE JOURNEY: Concepts That Support a Study of the Professional Trajectories of Jewish Educators, Rosov Consulting, March 2019
The Hiddur Initiative, a project of the Foundation for Jewish Camp (FJC), with support from the Jim Joseph Foundation, AVI CHAI Foundation, and the Maimonides Fund, guides Jewish residential camps through a process to improve their Jewish vision and programming in service of inspiring campers to live engaged, knowledgeable, and joyful Jewish lives. The project was piloted in eight residential camps for a three-year period and has just completed its third and final year.
Hiddur employed a cohort of seasoned camp educators who were each matched as coaches with Jewish residential camps, with the goal of supporting the camps’ development of tools and skills to improve their Jewish experiential education programs. Coaches met with their camps on a regular basis throughout the year and worked with camps in person during the fall, spring, and summer. Camps, in turn, committed to working with their coach and engaging lay-leaders in the Hiddur process. Collectively, the goal of these activities was to improve each camp’s Jewish educational vision and practice, and, as a result, campers’ Jewish engagement.
In this third and final year of Rosov Consulting’s work with the Hiddur Initiative, the evaluators concentrated their work on evaluating the camps’ efforts to engage staff and impact campers, while at the same time comparing Year 3 data to Years 1 and 2. In each year of Hiddur, Rosov Consulting collected both qualitative and quantitative data.
Beautification and Exploration: Evaluating Three Years of the Hiddur Initiative
In May 2018, Leading Edge conducted its third annual Employee Experience Survey. Participants included 7,300 employees from 105 Jewish nonprofit organizations with different missions, budgets, staff sizes, and geographic locations. Leading Edge’s primary purpose is to use the survey to help these willing organizations create even better places to work. For the 52 organizations that have now taken the Leading Edge survey more than once, the commitment to improving workplace culture can be seen in the results — 73% either improved their scores from year to year, or simply started and remained strong on the whole.
Are Jewish Organizations Great Places to Work? Results from the third annual employee experience survey, 2018, Leading Edge and Culture Amp
Israel education begins with passionate and knowledgeable educators who can tell their own stories about Israel and ends with learners whose stories live in dialogue with the story of the People, Land, and State of Israel.
To mark the occasion of The iCenter’s 10th anniversary, RMC Research was commissioned to conduct an impact study. It found that The iCenter has made a powerful and comprehensive impact on those who work directly with young people of all ages in all frameworks.
The report details The iCenter’s impact in shaping organizational cultures and supporting educators who directly reach learners.
Full Impact Report, October 2018
Abridged Impact Study, October 2018
The Greater Boston Jewish Teen Education and Engagement Initiative (the Initiative), launched in January of
2014 by Combined Jewish Philanthropies of Greater Boston (CJP) and the Jim Joseph Foundation, aims to enhance Jewish teen lives in the Greater Boston area. This report provides an overview of key evaluation findings and considerations from data collected in Phase III of the Initiative’s evaluation. The evaluation used a mixed methods approach, including surveys with two key informant groups and interviews with members of three additional groups.
CJP Boston Jewish Teen Education & Engagement Initiative Evaluation, Phase 3 Report: 2017-2018, October 2018