News & Blogs Category: From the Foundation Team

I stepped into the Jim Joseph Foundation office for the first time as a Jewish philanthropy professional around 7:45 am on Thursday, October 15, 2015. On Friday, June 7, 2019, I exited the office for the last time as a Program Officer for the Foundation. Many of us come and go from various jobs and professions, so we know what it’s like to start work, do the work, and end the work. I was honored and privileged to work here, and part of what I loved so much was the opportunity to reflect and to learn. In fact, if there’s one thing I enjoyed and appreciated most about my funder colleagues, my grantee-partners, my peers in secular philanthropy, and our trusted consultants, is how much they taught me over the past three-and-one-half years.

One of the first assignments that I received upon donning the role of Program Officer was to meet with and speak with dozens of program officers from other foundations to hear their stories: What led them to where they are now? What challenges do they see in the field of Jewish education? What opportunities on the horizon excite them? For those who know me, you can imagine this being an assignment I relished. Set up coffee dates with those wiser and more learned than me? Sign me up! I was skimming through some of these notes recently, and I must have had 30-40 conversations in those first few months to get me up to speed in the vernacular of Jewish communal life (this was, after all, my first Jewish professional job, and my first job in philanthropy. My previous 10 years had been spent running a K-12 tutoring company, and before that I was a high school math and science teacher).

My first Jewish Funders Network conference was an exciting blur of camp-meets-summit, continuing to meet new colleagues, re-connect with folks I had met virtually, and connect with a few legends in the field who my assigned first-time mentor, Jon Woocher, z’’l, made sure I met: Cindy Chazan, Joni Blinderman, and Yossi Abramowitz. As I was already starting to carve out distinct portfolios in my grantee and project work, these three helped introduce me to the worlds of Jewish leadership, early childhood education, and educational technology.

As I progressed, my feet sank deeper into learning more and more about leadership programs: What’s out there, and what works? Who are the key players? Where does the Jim Joseph Foundation currently invest, and what might a more focused leadership investment strategy look like? I remember the first presentation and discussion I led with my Foundation colleagues, based on researching our current and previous grants in the space, creating a rudimentary leadership rubric to determine which grants are “leadership grants,” and proposing a few high level ideas to inform strategic investments going forward. While some of those early ideas stuck (we led a successful Leadership Retreat in summer 2018, and are considering leadership capacity grants), others are still in formation (what would it look like to provide a coach or mentor to every Jewish professional? What would it look like to fund CEO sabbaticals?).

From this initial research, I was encouraged to explore secular leadership programs and strategies, while also continuing to dig deeper into the concept of “Jewish leadership.” Similar to my listening tour to better understand Jewish foundation professionals, I embarked on a series of conversations, focus groups, conferences, and think tanks that explored leadership from myriad angles. I met Phil Li, President & CEO of the Robert Sterling Clark Foundation, whose approach to networked leadership led to the creation of the Sterling Network to bring together cross-sector leaders in New York City. I met Claire Peeps, Executive Director of the Durfee Foundation, who provides leaders in Los Angeles with a Durfee Sabbatical, and other leaders with a longer Stanton Fellowship to support them to think deeply about a complex challenge. I met Holly Delany Cole, Director of the Flexible Leadership Awards, a Haas, Jr. Initiative that provides supplemental funding to core grantee organizations to more deeply invest in customized leadership capacity solutions. These three colleagues, and many others in the Leadership Funders Group, as well as Fund the People, helped nourish my soul and quench my thirst for knowledge, introducing me to new ways of thinking and new people to meet, all of whom focused their attention squarely in the leadership space.

There are too many books, articles, blogs, and publications to recount that also informed my thinking and helped me on my journey as a foundation professional learning about leadership. But a few that sparked lasting ideas around effective leadership investing are GEO’s Investing in Leadership Strategies, HBR’s On Leadership, and Bridgespan’s Leadership Pipeline Alliance Report, which led to the formation of Leading Edge. I am indebted to my friends and colleagues at the Schusterman Family Foundation and Wexner Foundation, for their continued teaching and meta-leadership in this arena. I will always be thankful to my friends and colleagues at the Jim Joseph Foundation for their patience with my numerous questions and their desire to also think big with me. And especially to the Jim Joseph Foundation’s two senior leaders with whom I worked—Chip Edelsberg and Barry Finestone. They each mentored and coached me in their own distinct way; I am eternally grateful for the opportunities they gave me.

This July, my family and I are moving to Long Beach, where I grew up, to be closer to our kids’ grandparents. It is a very bittersweet transition, not only to leave my colleagues here, but to leave my community in San Francisco, where I have lived for nearly 25 years. We will surely grow new roots in Southern California, with the gracious and generous help of our parents, friends and relatives. I feel good about the work we’ve done together. I remain optimistic about our future. The Jewish people are strong. We are resilient. We are creative, and innovative, and educated. We are not wont for leaders or leadership—they are sitting and standing among us. I know that the skills and relationships I have formed here are without a doubt some of the strongest I have made in my lifetime, and I will carry them with me into this next phase of my career. They are built on curiosity, on humility, on vulnerability. And perhaps that is what leadership must teach all of us—to be curious, to be humble, to be vulnerable—with ourselves, and with each other.

Godspeed, my friends.

Seth Linden was a Program Officer at the Jim Joseph Foundation for 3.5 years. He is now a philanthropy consultant focusing on board culture and governance, leadership and talent development, and designing and facilitating learning retreats. He can be reached at [email protected] and you can read more at www.gatherconsulting.org.

“What would remain if Foundation funding disappeared?” This was a common question that former Jim Joseph Foundation Executive Director Chip Edelsberg posed to challenge the professional team during the early launch phases of Foundation-supported teen education initiatives. But really, the question itself reflects a guiding principle of the Foundation since its inception; that is, to support organizations and initiatives in ways that are sustainable so that Jewish learning endeavors live on—and continue to benefit young people—even after a grant period concludes.

This principle, essentially a goal for each grant, has informed grantmaking decisions and the lengths and structures of Foundation grants.  We have learned lessons over the years about strategies and approaches to make this goal more likely to be achieved, including awarding matching grants to encourage new funding sources, supporting grantee-partners’ strategic planning processes, open and frequent conversations with grantee-partners, setting expectations with grantee-partners, and providing grantee-partners with enough time to position themselves for success if and when Foundation funding ceased. We have also gained a deep understanding about the power of a capacity building grant to help a grantee-partner grow in a sustainable way. Through trials and errors—and some fail forwards—we have learned about both the benefits of growing and the potential risks when a grantee-partner or the marketplace simply is not ready.

These are all important learnings and strategies for the Foundation, and perhaps for peer funders as well. What they are not, however, are actual tools for the grantee-partner to use to help them on their path towards sustainability. Over the last couple of years, the Jewish Teen Education and Engagement Funder Collaborative (FC)—a complex, multi-faceted grouping of different funders and organizations from around the country—elevated the goal of sustainability for each of its ten communities in very concrete ways. The FC’s ten community teen initiatives all worked diligently from the beginning to lay the groundwork for sustainability. Community stakeholders were engaged throughout so that our local funding partners, often Federations, designed initiatives that reflected the community’s actual needs and wants—not just what the local partner thought the community needed or wanted. Communities had conversations with program providers at the beginning stages of the grant period about expectations around sustainability. This complex community planning process helped develop teen initiatives that had broad buy-in from the start, thus also enhancing the likelihood of their sustainability.

In this vein, the communities came together to develop clear Measures of Success—one of which is to “Build Models for Jewish Teen Education that are Sustainable.” However, defining what success looks like without also offering a way to measure against it would somewhat render it moot. While complex surveys were developed for other measures of success—an appropriate approach in those cases—measuring a community’s readiness for sustainability required something different. That’s when Rosov Consulting, which serves as the cross-community evaluator, developed the Sustainability Diagnostic Tool (SDT) for communities to better understand the ways in which they were developing a sustainable ecosystem. This diagnostic process, which, importantly, communities can use themselves, offers community leadership and stakeholders the opportunity to assess and reflect on their progress towards sustainability.

As seen above, the SDT offers clear indicators and a qualitative sliding scale for communities to gauge progress themselves. Taken together, communities will gain a deep understanding about their readiness to “make it on their own.” Particularly important is that this is a usable diagnostic tool that communities themselves can deploy; each community received instructions to conduct interviews with key community stakeholders. They posed questions to elicit answers that would inform where the teen initiative fell in different categories of the rubric: “To what extent would you say that the leadership of the community’s teen ecosystem has a clearly stated mission for its work?” To what extent would you say that the community’s teen ecosystem has strong and stable leadership?” “To what extent would you say the community’s teen ecosystem has secured a financial future?” With the indicators in mind, to what extent is there evidence in the teen ecosystem of demand for service?”

Like other funders, we have seen expensive efforts we supported grow and build momentum, achieve great programmatic outcomes, but then fail to build the kind of broader communal investment that an initiative needs to endure over the longer-term. The SDT is designed so that grantee-partners can help themselves develop that kind of staying power. We are sharing this now as some communities in the FC move towards the final stages of their grant period. They already planned initiatives, received their first grant, received a renewal, and are fine-tuning the most effective parts of their initiatives. The communities nearing the end of their grant periods are finding great value in the SDT. Equally as exciting is that other communities, in earlier stages of their grant period, are already using the SDT so that the rubric and accompanying interview questions inform their stakeholder conversations and related initiative planning now:

The Sustainability Diagnostic Tool has really helped keep us honest with respect to how we’ve measured inroads and impact in our community’s initiative. Having this rubric has been a great way to remind ourselves what we mean by ‘success’, and has enabled us to validate some paths we’ve taken, or think about course corrections when necessary. – Brian Jaffee, Executive Director of the Jewish Foundation of Cincinnati, the local funder of the Cincinnati Jewish Teen Collective.

The FC itself is a “big” story with many layers, organizations, and learnings. We’re telling one specific, yet critical, part of it now. We hope that by highlighting our Foundation’s learnings regarding sustainability and what we believe to be a critical new tool, other funders and organizations will be able to adapt the new SDT for any initiative that they want to see achieve sustainability. Having sustainability as a principle, as a goal, was important. But the SDT helps us and grantee-partners more definitively and accurately answer that key question: “What would remain if Foundation funding disappeared?”

Before using the SDT, please reach out to Sara Allen, Executive Director of the Jewish Teen Education and Engagement Funder Collaborative, at [email protected] for full instructions and insights.

Aaron Saxe is a Senior Program Officer at the Jim Joseph Foundation.

[This post is the last in the series on the new report, The Future of Jewish Learning is Here: How Digital Media Are Reshaping Jewish Education, by Stanford University’s Ari Y. Kelman. The report, commissioned by the Jim Joseph Foundation, was released in conjunction with the recent Jewish Funders Network conference. The series shares multiple perspectives on the findings and questions raised in The Future of Jewish Learning.]

The Future of Jewish Learning Is Here is an admittedly ambitious title for a report. Yet it seems to capture both the seemingly endless opportunities that new technology presents and the critical reality that people are utilizing many of these technologies to learn and to positively influence their lives. Digital media, specifically for Jewish learning purposes, are being consumed on a meaningful scale, in different ways, and by diverse groups of people, and are changing how we, as a field, should think about Jewish education.

For the Jim Joseph Foundation, this report offers much to unpack and to reflect on. A decade ago, digital media was in its nascent stage of opening new and more opportunities for Jewish learning. Yet, the Foundation shied away from any significant investment. The space, for the Foundation, presented too many unknowns. At the same time, our approach and understanding of Jewish education admittedly was not yet broad enough to include some of the very real learning that was in fact occurring online. Thus, The Future of Jewish Learning Is Here is indicative of our own evolution in thinking and recognition that the nature of Jewish learning has, and continues to, evolve – and that it is driven in part by digital media opportunities today.

Josh Miller is Chief Program Officer at the Jim Joseph Foundation. Seth Linden is a Program Officer at the Foundation. The complete report, The Future of Jewish Learning is Here: How Digital Media Are Reshaping Jewish Education, is available for download here.

Full article in eJewishPhilanthropy