Learning & Resources Category: Teen Engagement and Education

Eight years after the first local initiative was launched as part of the Jewish Teen Education and Engagement Funder Collaborative, the Cross-Community Evaluation team explores in this final report what has been accomplished to date. The research team examines to what extent the Funder Collaborative’s goals were realized and the main educational lessons learned from this project. They employ a high-altitude view to search for patterns across the 10 participating communities and across the arc of multiple years. And they draw on findings already produced by local evaluators in each of the communities and on the insights gained by those evaluators, as gathered in their annual reports.

These insights have been further supplemented through structured questioning of the local evaluators by the Cross-Community Evaluation team. In this way, researchers construct a picture of the educational and engagement strategies employed, achievements reached, obstacles faced, and implications for future work in this field. Ultimately, this pinnacle report provides an opportunity to explore the extent to which philanthropic leadership and coordinated programmatic interventions can induce a largescale shift in how and for whom Jewish education and engagement is practiced.

The report covers insights in the following key areas related to strategic philanthropy, collaboration among and between funders and practitioners, and Jewish teen engagement:

• Local Enterprises Meet Local Needs & Reflect Culture – Peer-to-Peer Learning Facilitates the Spread of Good Ideas
• It’s All About the Teens – Shifting the Mindset of Jewish Growth and Learning
• Development of Sustainable Models Takes Many Forms – Positive Change Tied to Structure and Innovation Strategies
• A Common Cause: Professional Development for Teen Educators – Investing in Professionals is an Important Ingredient for Long-Term Change
• (Re-)Setting the Communal Table – Building a Holistic Ecosystem Involves Teens, Parents, Educators and Stakeholders

Lessons from the Pinnacle: Coordinated Innovation Shifts the Landscape of Jewish Teen Education & Engagement, Rosov Consulting, December 2021

The Denver Boulder Jewish Teen Education and Engagement Initiative began in 2014 with a partnership between Rose Community Foundation and Jim Joseph Foundation. The Initiative was conceived in part in response to a research project on local Jewish teen engagement conducted in 2010 by Rose Community Foundation’s Jewish Life Committee and the Allied Jewish Federation (now JEWISHcolorado).

The Initiative began its first phase (2014–18) with three objectives and a commitment to encourage innovation in
Jewish teen programming. The Initiative’s original objectives were:

1. Increase funding to existing innovators and new projects as a means to provide higher-quality experiences
   and achieve incremental growth in teen participation.
2. Increase the number and quality of Jewish professionals and trained volunteers working with Jewish
   teens.
3. Promote youth initiatives and youth-led ideas that engage teens and their peers in Jewish life.

The Denver Boulder Jewish Teen Initiative was one of the first of 10 initiatives across the US working collaboratively to create new Jewish teen programming and increase teen engagement. The Jewish Teen Funder Collaborative organized a group of national and local funders to study and explore pathways to greater Jewish teen engagement. Since 2014, each community working with the Collaborative has worked toward a common set of outcomes, expectations, and measures of success, with some additions and adaptations to address specific needs or interests of a sponsoring community. A national evaluation effort, referred to as the Cross-Community Evaluation (CCE), developed tools for this shared measurement and aggregates the data collected from the 10 communities’ evaluations to capture national-level trends and common learnings.

Over its seven years, the Jewish Teen Initiative has produced both positive outcomes for the region’s teens and an abundance of information and lessons learned that will help inform future investments in the local teen ecosystem. As our region and communities across the country consider future models and innovations for improving Jewish teen programming and increasing teen engagement, we hope this report will serve as a useful resource.
– Vanessa Bernier, Community Impact Officer – Jewish Life, Rose Community Foundation

Looking Back at Seven Years of the Denver Boulder Jewish Teen Initiative: Key Outcomes & Lessons Learned, October 2021, Informing Change

View Informing Change’s evaluations of Year 1 and Year 3 of the Denver Boulder Jewish Teen Initiative. View the Cross-Community Evaluation of the Jewish Teen Funder Collaborative.

Starting in 2013, when the Jewish Teen Education and Engagement Funder Collaborative came into existence, the Jim Joseph Foundation along with 10 local funders and 4 national funders came together to make a noticeable difference to the outcomes achieved by Jewish teen education and engagement. Coinvesting with the  Foundation, each of the 10 communities crafted local initiatives, while the full group identified measures of success and hired an evaluation firm to assess the extent to which those measures were being achieved.

These two documents from Rosov Consulting—a case study of the Funder Collaborative and a cross-community evaluation report—offer deep insights and learnings about the structure, challenges, and successes of a Collaborative and about the efficacy of efforts in Jewish teen education and engagement.

1. Signs Along the Way: A Funder Collaborative Assesses its Influence. This final case study covers a three-year period roughly from November 2016 through the end of 2019 and attempts to answer the questions posed by the final phase in the trajectory of a funder collaborative: How might the Funder Collaborative begin to assess its impact in the field of teen engagement and how, if at all, are ideas spreading between and beyond the work of the funders?
2. Cross-Community Evaluation for the Funder Collaborative. The evaluation presents findings of work completed during the 2018–2019 program year and homes in on those findings most ripe for appreciation and action. There is a strong correlation between teens’ connection to Jewish values and the influence those values have on the lives teens choose to lead. Substantive Jewish content creates a sense of belonging, a desire to do good in the world, and a platform for teens to build friendships—these peer relationships also contribute to strong Jewish outcomes overall. The report concludes with recommendations applicable beyond the 10 community-based teen initiatives, informing any organization committed to effective teen programs, professional development for youth professionals, and affordability of programs for parents.

The New York Teen Initiative (NYTI) is the collaborative effort of UJA-Federation of New York and the Jim Joseph Foundation (as funding partners), and The Jewish Education Project (as lead operator) to redefine the New York area’s Jewish teen engagement field. This ambitious initiative unfolds as 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.

To evaluate the ongoing success of its second phase, NYTI has partnered with Rosov Consulting to explore the following five questions:

1. In what ways and to what extent do NYTI programs demonstrate readiness to expand?
2. To what degree does the diversity of the Jewish teens served by NYTI programs resemble the known diversity of the Greater New York City Jewish community?
3. Has NYTI’s investment in marketing efforts—specifically the FindYourSummer.org website and the deployment of Find Your Summer Ambassadors—increased market awareness of NYTI?
4. What is the ongoing impact of NYTI’s investment in scholarships on incentivizing participation, at a time when the level of subsidization is projected to decline?
5. How has the new internship program—Summer Excelerator—fared? Was it able to successfully get off the ground, meet its recruitment goals, and meaningfully engage teens?

Stepping Up and Forward: NYTI 2019 (Phase II Year 1) Evaluation Report, March 2020

The data file from the survey of more than 17,500 Jewish teens that was conducted for the 2019 report, GenZ Now: Understanding and Engaging Jewish Teens, is now housed on the Berman Jewish DataBank. This “public use” data set is available for anyone to use for future analyses and research.

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

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.

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

The Jewish Teen Education and Engagement Funder Collaborative is an unprecedented collaboration of national and local funders working together to develop, nurture, and scale new approaches to teen engagement. More than five years ago, the Foundation brought together ten communities to begin co-investing in new teen engagement efforts that would be informed by up-to-the-minute research and data.  The participating communities today are united by six shared Measures of Success and are guided by Outcomes Which Positively Affect the Lives of Jewish Teens, a paradigm shift that demands that educators and the institutions in which they work deeply consider their core mission and now ask, “how can our work help this teen thrive as a human being in today’s complex and challenging world?”

Emerging Trends: Insights from the Jewish Teen Education and Engagement Funder Collaborative, Sara Allen, Director of the Collaborative, September 2018

Read the full Cross-Community Evaluation Findings for the Jewish Teen Education and Engagement Funder Collaborative, Rosov Consulting, September 2018

In this report, Rosov Consulting presents a set of 18 findings stemming from its analysis of quantitative and qualitative data gathered by evaluators working in eight of 10 communities constituting the Jewish Teen Education and Engagement Funder Collaborative during 2017. At the heart of the matter lie three central learning questions:

1. How and to what extent are the community-based Jewish teen education and engagement initiatives collectively achieving the goals outlined in the Shared Measures of Success?
2. What best practices and learnings emerging from the work of these initiatives (both anticipated and unanticipated) can be applied across the communities and to other Jewish education and engagement settings?
3. How does variability across communities influence the design, implementation, and outcomes of the local community-based Jewish teen education and engagement initiatives?

Cross-Community Evaluation Findings for the Jewish Teen Education and Engagement Funder Collaborative, September 2018

Read a companion piece to the cross-community evaluation, Emerging Trends: Insights from the Jewish Teen Education and Engagement Funder Collaborative, Sara Allen, Director of the Collaborative, September 2018

The four-year, nine-million-dollar New York Teen Initiative is a jointly funded investment of the UJA-Federation of New York and the Jim Joseph Foundation. With The Jewish Education Project serving as lead operator, the Initiative seeks to redesign and redefine the area’s Jewish teen engagement through the creation of compelling summer experiences. The Initiative builds on UJA Federation of New York’s historic and current efforts to support programs that attract teenagers to Jewish life and experiences. 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.

Conceived as an effort that would set in motion a long-term sea change in Jewish teen programming, the NYTI includes three main components:
1. Incubation of new programmatic models for Jewish teen summer experiences, including local New York area programs, domestic travel in the United States, and Israel travel.

2. Comprehensive marketing to increase awareness of new and existing summer opportunities.

3. Scholarship programs to help make new and existing summer experiences more affordable for teens’ families.

New York Teen Initiative: Taking Root and Branching Out, Year 3 Evaluation Findings, March 2018