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Foundation for Jewish Camp launches new safety program

Summer camp is an entirely immersive experience.

That is a jargon-y way of saying that when you are a child or a teenager or a young staff member, and you’re in camp, camp is your entire world. It surrounds you; you breathe it and you move through it and it coats your skin and it’s all you see and hear and touch and feel and know. While you’re at camp, nothing else matters except vaguely; if camp works for you as it does for so many campers, the rest of the year is a countdown toward camp.

Jewish summer camping is one of the most effective ways of teaching and socializing and orienting young Jews. During the time they’re at camp, Jewish campers at Jewish camps live entirely Jewishly. Their parents can choose from a range of Jewish camps — Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, Zionist, progressive, Yiddishist, artsy, sporty — and their children will come home with an understanding of that part of the Jewish world bonded at the molecular level.

The Foundation for Jewish Camp (not Camping, or Camps, just plain stark Camp) understands that and supports that range of Jewish camps. This week, the foundation held its seventh biennial conference, the Leaders Assembly; this year, it met in Baltimore.

Jeremy Fingerman (All photos courtesy FJC)

The camp leaders, educators, and foundation heads who met there explored the interplay of camp and the outside world, which waits right outside every camp’s borders. This year, “we had just shy of 800 people,” the Foundation for Jewish Camp’s executive director, Jeremy Fingerman of Englewood, said. “At this conference we unveiled a new initiative to prevent harassment and abuse and bullying and inappropriate language and behavior in camp communities.”

The Foundation plans to spend $100,000 on what it calls the Shmira Initiative, to “change camp culture on all levels, implementing a shift in staff programming, training, policy and enforcement around issues of gender, sex and power,” according to its press release.

Shmira means guard duty; in Jewish summer camps, it’s the counselors’ job, making sure that their charges are safe at night. The Foundation will take that term from the literal to the metaphoric level as it “embodies the social and individual responsibility every community member has to ensure a safe environment.”

So what does that mean?

“We believe that our mission at the Foundation is to help the field adapt to rapid, unprecedented change,” Mr. Fingerman said. “We are helping to create camp communities that reflect the best of Jewish values.

“Right now, in North America, we have been experiencing a breakthrough of consciousness of sex and gender and power and violence, and for sure there has been a new spotlight shining on power and exploitation,” he said. “These issues affect all our communities, and we have to address them. Working in partnership with parents and authorities and all our Jewish institutions, we believe that we really have a chance to define what prevention and response plans are, and to lead the discussion of cultural changes in our community.”

To begin, he continued, “We will raise the awareness of camps as they go through their staff programming to create camps that are caring and safe. This is something we have been talking about for a while.”

It is important to remember that the problems that the Shmira Initiative will address are not unique to camps, he added. They’re culturally pervasive, and to some extent they’re generational — millennials feel pressured in ways that their elders did not, and the generation below them, the iGen, as Mr. Fingerman called them, who are today’s campers and young staffers, feel that even more profoundly.

A panel discussion features, from left, Julie Beren Platt; Lisa Eisen, Barry Finestone, Rachel Garbow Monroe, and Deborah Meyer.

And although the problems the initiative is set to tackle are society-wide, “we had a panel, moderated by our board chair, of foundation heads, powerhouses in the Jewish world,” come to talk and to offer help. Those leaders included the Foundation’s own new board chair, Julie Beren Platt, Lisa Eisen, vice president of the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation; Barry Finestone, president and CEO of the Jim Joseph Foundation; Rachel Garbow Monroe, president and CEO of the Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Foundation; and Deborah Meyer, CEO of Moving Traditions. (Irrelevant but totally fun fact — Ms. Platt is the mother of actor Ben Platt of Dear Evan Hansen, who has credited Camp Ramah in Ojai, California, as one of the places where he began to refine his craft. Don’t miss the YouTube video of him on Late Night with Seth Meyers, singing “Luck Be a Lady Tonight” from Guys and Dolls in Hebrew; he learned it, he said, by playing Sky Masterson at a Ramah production.)

“I am so proud they came to our conference,” Mr. Fingerman said. “I am so proud that they can see that we in the field of Jewish camp really want to step up and address this issue in an important way.”

Deborah Meyer

“Moving Traditions has been focused on moral development issues for a long time,” Ms. Meyer said. “How do we help understand who we are? We have been working with experts on healthy sexuality programs for years.”

Now, “we have gone to camps to train the staff, who are mainly teenagers or young adults, on issues of body image, bullying, sexuality, and the pressure to hook up,” Ms. Meyer said. It’s complicated.

For one thing, campers and counselors live in the outside world, they bring the attitudes they learn in that world, or online, with them to camp, Ms. Meyer said. For another, what she called “the pressure to hook up” often can be reframed as the communal desire to have young Jews date each other, which is in itself a good thing. “But on the other hand it can be inappropriate and problematic,” she said, insofar as it pushes often age-inappropriate sexuality on kids who are not yet ready for it. “We have come to understand that more in the last few years.”

Any kid — any person — who has access to a computer — in other words, just about everyone — sees deeply disturbing things that they cannot fit into their understanding of the world, and it can be warping. “Any kid who has a smart device today is seeing pornography, either looking for it or stumbling across it,” Ms. Meyer said. “And they are freaked out by it. We have had boys say, ‘Do I have to choke a girl?’ What they see is so aberrant.

“And girls don’t know that sex is something that they can enjoy. They learn online that sex is something that girls and women do for boys and men. They don’t know that it’s intimacy, that they do for and with each other, and they do it for love.

A scene from the Special Olympics at the JCC Camp Chi in Chicago.

“That is where Jewish values come in,” she said. “We don’t want to say that the body is bad.” And camp is embodied.” It’s physical; it’s not a disembodied intellectual experience. “You are living there, all summer long, inside your body. It’s an opportunity to teach the right values. “Sexuality is about intimacy,” she said. “You don’t get a kiss, or steal a kiss. You kiss with somebody.” It’s about choice and caring.

When Moving Traditions works with staffers, either as they get to camp to prepare for the summer or once camp has started, there is a two-step process. “The first part is when the staffers find out about the camp’s stated policies and the second part is when they talk about how things really happen,” Ms. Meyer said. “They find out that they have great policies and values but they are not always fulfilled.” Sometimes the language of teasing can be hurtful; “the words can be homophobic or gender stereotypes, and full of body image objectification. And it is not conscious.”

What does she mean? For example, campers often are encouraged to pair off for Shabbat walks; when a boy gets back to his bunk, his friends “might put a chair in the middle of the room, and he is asked to sit there and tell them exactly what happened on the walk.” Hand-holding, kissing, the sort of intimacy that is appropriate for teenagers but not meant to be shared with anyone else.

“It is not a conscious thing,” Ms. Meyer said. “It is not as if they are pushing boys to push girls to have sex. But it comes out of their tradition, out of the camp culture that has developed over many decades.

Campers at Ramah in the Poconos celebrate Israel Day.

“It is inappropriate,” she said. “This counselor may be a 19-year-old and this is what happened to him when he was in this camp. He might not remember that not all boys want to do this. It is not coming from a place of venality, or of consciously trying to pursue an agenda. He would have thought that it was funny and sweet.” But it’s not.

These exercises help the staff assess the differences between the camp’s beliefs, policies, and goals, and the reality of camp life. The fact that it falls short isn’t shocking — it’s a human institution — but pointing it out helps staffers keep their real goals and values in mind.

“We work with counselors to help them see the issues for themselves, and then we help them figure out how to approach the kids,” Ms. Meyer said.

“In the earlier grades, we find that crushes are kind of pushes. This is an unconscious agenda, not a planned curriculum, but somehow the culture fosters the ‘Who do you have a crush on? Who do you want to be a couple with?’ when you are 8 or 9. But you’re not necessarily interested then, so why push it? Even when the kids get older, how do we foster a healthy sexuality?

“When I say sexuality, I am not just talking about intercourse,” she added. “I am talking about feelings. Feeling interested. Feeling excited. For most people, this starts happening around puberty, and we want to be able to acknowledge it and celebrate it, and also set boundaries around what is ethical and what is normal and what is not.

“Judaism is about discerning differences and setting boundaries. It is about what is Shabbat and what is chol.”

Welcoming Shabbat at URJ Camp Harlam in Pennsylvania.

There is a balance that it is necessary to remember, Ms. Meyer added. It is easy, when you talk about the Shmira Initiative and the problems it has been established to counter, to forget the joys and overwhelming value of Jewish summer camp. That would be a huge mistake.

“We have aspects of our tradition that are so beautiful, and we can access the best of comprehensive secular sexuality education and social and emotional learning, and we can connect those things,” Ms. Meyer said. “That is what Moving Traditions does. Our approach to Jewish teaching and Jewish wisdom is to show Jewish counselors and Jewish educators how to bring this teaching, this understanding of what it means to be a Jewish person into the teenage years, and then young adulthood.”

In trying to help young Jewish campers and counselors deal with the issues of sexuality that the Me Too movement has unearthed, we must not overlook the value of camp. “The good news is that we are paying attention to these things,” Ms. Meyer said. “We are working with camps across the country that really want to do it right, to integrate a healthy way of looking at it. That’s because camp culture can be so positive. We are working with camps across the country to truly foster a very positive and healthy camp culture.

“The good news is that we are paying attention to these things. How wonderful for Jewish families who send their kids to camp, who are looking to address issues from our secular world that impact our children, whether they go to public school or day school. Camp is where kids really learn to be members of a community, which is such a good thing for the Jewish community.

“We are looking at how to create a community that is based on ethical, respectful, positive behavior.

“When you think about it, the role of Judaism is redemption,” Ms. Meyer said. “It is about bringing God into the world. When we pray, when we do acts of lovingkindness, we are tapping into the divine.

“At Jewish summer camp, we want to make more of that happen. We want to make it more and more clear that we are created b’zelem Elohim — in God’s image. So how fabulous — how excellent! — that the Jewish community is investing in creating a camp culture that allows us to greet each other b’zelem Elohim.”

Source: Joanne Palmer, New Jersey Jewish Standard

In Los Angeles, about a decade ago, we examined the work of our Federation and concluded that to fulfill our mission and ensure a strong Jewish community committed to Jewish values, we needed to invest more in creating meaningful Jewish experiences for young people. Years later, after the Pew study on Jewish Americans was released, we redoubled our efforts and expanded our programming throughout the city and to nearly every suburb. No part of our work is more important.

Throughout the continent, there are many Jewish organizations doing great work to connect and engage young people with Jewish life – but none have the reach into local communities like Jewish Federations. For that reason, I’m thrilled to announce the launch of a new effort aimed at boosting the skills of those Federation professionals working directly with people in their 20s and 30s.

With an investment from the Jim Joseph Foundation, The Jewish Federations of North America (JFNA) has created the Next Gen Jewish Federation Fellowship, an 18-month comprehensive program offering participants the tools and training they need to lead this critically important effort. Working together for the first time, the North Carolina-based Center for Creative Leadership and the Jerusalem-based M²: The Institute for Experiential Jewish Education are helping us build a program to grow participants’ leadership skills and connect them more deeply to Judaism and Jewish identity.

We’ve hand-selected the first 22 fellows through a competitive process, and I’m incredibly proud that Los Angeles is in this impressive group. Alexi Biener will represent my hometown Federation. She plays a leading role in our Los Angeles-wide effort to identify and meaningfully connect promising young leaders to Federation’s local and global work, while also helping them develop their own leadership skills. We are thrilled that she will be a Next Gen Jewish Federation Fellow.

Speaking with JFNA’s Rabbi David Kessel, who founded the new fellowship, I learned that more than half of the recipients have Master’s degrees or advanced training certificates, and several joined Federation from outside the Jewish communal sector. From the many paths before them, they chose to help people along their Jewish journeys. They wanted to be a part of something meaningful and important.

Melanie Gerchberg from Philadelphia wrote on her fellowship application that “this is the first time in my life that my personal values are 100% in line with my professional values and the mission of the organization for which I work.” She left a more lucrative job in property development to ensure that young people see their contributions as “a way for them to effect change.”

We have all seen the statistics, but statistics don’t tell us the full story. We still have a lot to learn about generational trends, attitudes, behaviors, and preferences, but I can tell you that anyone who thinks that these young people don’t care is 100 percent wrong. We can motivate and capture their imaginations by talking with them and bringing authenticity and curiosity to the conversation. We need to meet them where they are and make Judaism matter.

A community does not just happen. Jews come from different backgrounds, belong to different synagogues – or no synagogue at all. But we have something much more important in common: We are all Jews, and we share a common tradition, a remarkable tradition. The experiences of each generation may be different, but the tradition and its values do not change. We all have a sacred obligation to make sure that our young people from each generation understand their tradition, who they are and where they come from as they choose how they are going to lead their lives.

Throughout the continent, a new generation is asking big questions about why Judaism matters and we must do the best we can to engage them. Those of us involved with JFNA and throughout the Federation Movement are passionate about building a vibrant Jewish future. Nearly 100 of our Federations have at least one professional committed to Next Gen engagement, and thanks to the new Fellowship we now have the opportunity to ensure that Next Gen engagement is high quality and meaningful across the board and for years to come.

Rabbi Kessel describes the incoming fellows as educators who see themselves as leaders and innovators. With the right set of tools, skills, and knowledge, he says, they will continue to deepen their reach into their local Jewish young adult communities and could even catalyze change within the entire Federation Movement.

We have the highest expectations for this group, and the confidence that they will lead us toward new solutions and strategies as we, together, work to fulfill that promise of a vibrant Jewish future.

Richard V. Sandler is Chair, Board of Trustees, of the Jewish Federations of North America.

Source: eJewishPhilanthropy

The multi-faceted Denver/Boulder Jewish Teen Education and Engagement Initiative (Initiative) is involving more teens in Jewish life, offering them new programs they find relevant, and helping them develop leadership skills – says a new evaluation on the Initiative. The Initiative, funded by Rose Community Foundation, with additional funding from the Jim Joseph Foundation and other donors, supports the expansion of innovative teen-focused organizations in the Denver/Boulder area. Rose Community Foundation made a $1.08 million grant, which was matched by a $1.08 million investment from the Jim Joseph Foundation to help the initiative reach sustainability and to add an UpStart Hub in Denver/Boulder focus on professional development for youth professionals and other offerings supporting innovation in the local Jewish ecosystem.

“Because of our investments in innovation, Denver/Boulder has an even richer ecosystem of Jewish teen programs that tap into the many different interests and ambitions of teens today,” says Lisa Farber Miller, Senior Program Officer of Jewish Life at Rose Community Foundation (RCF). “It is also exciting to see the evolution in our community and the ways organizations are communicating and collaborating with each other – all so Jewish teens can choose from a range of meaningful experiences and all professionals working with teens have the opportunity to grow and learn together.”

The Initiative was one of the early grantees of the Jewish Teen Education and Engagement Funder Collaborative, a collaboration of national and local funders working together to develop, nurture, and scale new approaches to teen engagement. RCF designed the Denver/Boulder Initiative, which in turn supports the Boulder Jewish Teen Initiative; Jewish Student Connection; Moving Traditions; and PresenTense Colorado: A Program of UpStart. The newest addition to the Initiative is the launch of an UpStart Hub in Denver/Boulder, which will help lead existing efforts dedicated to the teen professionals’ network and professional development. These efforts were previously led by jHub, which is sun-setting now that the Initiative is in its fourth year. Denver/Boulder will be UpStart’s fifth regional hub, part of its network of programming in dozens of communities across the country. Its expertise in developing and supporting innovators, offering professional development and coaching, and its overall user-centered approach will be accessible to teen professionals and numerous other professionals and Jewish organizations engaged in innovation.

“With UpStart in Denver/Boulder, teens and teen professionals will work with one of the leading national innovators in the Jewish community,” adds Farber Miller. “This is an important addition to our community and will help us build on the positive outcomes seen over the last four years.”

The evaluation conducted by Informing Change shows that:

• Teens enjoy their experiences supported by the Initiative, and that these experiences lead to positive outcomes in their lives. Most Jewish teens participating in Initiative programs report increases in connections to Judaism and the Jewish communities.
• Beyond enjoying their time, the majority of teens who participated in programs say they increased in 13 Jewish learning and growth outcomes identified by the Initiative.
• Grantees provided over 2,300 programs in the first three years of the Initiative, including new experiments in different programming options and recruitment techniques to bring in more teens. This resulted in 66 percent of the teens surveyed through these first three years saying they were new to grantees’ programs and 11percent of the Jewish teens specifically saying that they were new to Jewish programs overall.
• Grantees had success in introducing new teens to the Jewish community and continuing to engage teens who were already fairly involved. There also are signs of more diversity among participating Jewish teens, including those who have been less involved in the Jewish community previously.
• Most professionals feel prepared to work with teens and connect them to Jewish opportunities. In addition to their group work with teens, nearly all (93percent) professionals surveyed provide one-on-one mentoring to teens, with almost half (47percent) saying they do it often. This enables them to provide individualized guidance and support for teens. Professionals say, however, that they feel less prepared to support their programs’ finances. This is an area the Initiative could target for future professional development.

Adds Farber Miller, “Our goal in this next phase of work is to continue to help the greater Denver/ Boulder area make Jewish life relevant and meaningful to young people both now and later in their lives. Teens will continue to serve as active partners together with their peers, adults, and community leaders in shaping their own Jewish journeys. We hope that throughout their lives, every Jewish teen in the Denver/Boulder Jewish communities can answer the question: ‘How can my Judaism inform, inspire and advance the good I seek to do in the world?’”

“The Denver/Boulder landscape is an innovative environment filled with wide-ranging opportunities for teens,” adds Jeff Tiell, Program Officer at the Jim Joseph Foundation. “There’s no single formula for effective teen engagement, but programs that give space for teens to create, learn, and connect with peers are known to be attractive to them. This Initiative builds on these best practices and offers important professional development for those who help create meaningful Jewish learning experiences for teens.”

Source: eJewishPhilanthropy

Long a cornerstone of the American Jewish experience, Jewish summer camp provides kids an unbreakable link to their past and a head start into their future.

For years, most Jewish camps offered a general program of swimming, sports, and arts and crafts, along with color wars, song sessions and, my personal favorite, Capture the Flag. But the world is changing and if our Jewish communal institutions do not adapt, our aspirations for a more vibrant Jewish future are at risk.

In camping, for example, we have noted parents’ growing demand for specialty camps to bolster their children’s skills and to address their increasingly sophisticated interests. Indeed, to remain competitive and to attract and retain even more campers, the field of Jewish camp has had to evolve.

Ten years ago, Foundation for Jewish Camp (FJC) created our Specialty Camps Incubator with the support of the Jim Joseph Foundation, later joined by the AVI CHAI Foundation. The Specialty Camps Incubator has launched Jewish specialty camps with a new model of high-quality skill-building activities combined and integrated with vibrant, experiential Jewish education. These new camps — including outdoor adventure, environmental sustainability, science and technology, and sports — have created a new dynamic in the field of Jewish overnight camping, offering alternatives to existing secular models, while infusing Jewish wisdom, tradition and joy into daily life.

To date, the new specialty camps have drawn more than 7,000 unique campers, most of whom had never considered Jewish camp as an option. Independent evaluations of the Specialty Camps Incubator demonstrate the lasting impact on campers who have not only improved their skills related to their passion, but also have become more engaged in Jewish life year-round.

Lessons learned from creating these camps from scratch inform and motivate the entire field of Jewish camping in forward-thinking adaptation and innovation. Not only do these new camps offer expertise and elite personnel in fresh, new areas of interest, they offer a new model in leasing existing spaces at universities and boarding schools with outstanding facilities. This efficient approach to creating sacred communal spaces
opens up opportunities across the field and beyond.

The Specialty Camps Incubator is dramatically changing the Jewish camp landscape in California and throughout North America, serving as an example of how the larger Jewish community must adapt and grow.

The Specialty Camps Incubator is dramatically changing the Jewish camp landscape in California.

This summer, six new overnight specialty camps will open, including two in Southern California. Havaya Arts will offer a unique creative and performing arts experience on the campus of the University of Redlands. The new URJ 6 Points Sci-Tech Academy West will engage campers’ curiosity about the world through hands-on scientific and technological exploration, experimentation, and reflection, while immersing them in a vibrant Jewish community on the campus of Cal Lutheran University in Thousand Oaks.

With funding from AVI CHAI, FJC’s Specialty Camp Accelerator launched two additional camps in 2016, including URJ 6 Points Sports Academy California, on the campus of Occidental College.

The new camps created through the Incubator and Accelerator programs have motivated all Jewish camps to think creatively and maximize their reach and Jewish learning.

This means that traditional camps are beginning to create and implement specialty tracks within their regular offerings in an effort to retain older campers and to attract those who might want to specialize in a particular activity. Some traditional camps also are rethinking session length influenced by the Incubator camps’ models, recognizing that shorter sessions
might attract campers who have a packed summer. The way Incubator camps approach integrating Jewish learning, values and reflections into their programming has had a lasting impact on campers’ Jewish engagement.

The evolving work of Jewish camp encourages our communal organizations across North America to raise the bar and attract more young people, engaging them in Jewish life for years to come.

Jeremy J. Fingerman is CEO of Foundation for Jewish Camp.

Source: Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles

As the #MeToo movement has grown and spread across industries and sectors, it has laid bare an inescapable truth: the Jewish community is subject to the same kinds of issues, inequities and power dynamics that exist in other communities.

Over the past few months, a group of leaders from several Jewish organizations have been discussing how we can ensure the Jewish community lives up to the highest ethical aspirations of our tradition.

Together, we are launching a new communal partnership.

The purpose of the partnership is to ensure that safe, respectful and equitable workplaces and communal spaces become universal in Jewish life and that sexual harassment and misconduct, as well as gender and sexual orientation discrimination, and their related abuses of power, are no longer tolerated in the Jewish community.

Such a large, complex challenge demands a collaborative response, one that mobilizes a coalition of stakeholders who share this vision. So, while we are launching the partnership with an initial group of representatives from more than 25 organizations, we hope it is the start of a much broader effort that will involve people and organizations of all sizes, denominations and locations.

Indeed, we hope to engage those who are affected by this problem, as well as those who want to ensure that the Jewish community lives up to the ideal that we are all created in the divine image and equally deserving of dignity and respect. To that end, the partnership will include people of all genders and sexual orientations. It will include professionals and volunteers, board members and community members. It will include young and old, religious and secular, and the diverse racial and ethnic mosaic that makes up today’s Jewish community.

We have spent the past few months working with dozens of people and experts to plan a collective impact initiative to advance the partnership vision. Our initial conversations have highlighted the need to create widespread change in individual organizations while also working to shift culture broadly. We will begin by focusing our efforts on these and other areas that may arise:

• Commitment and standards, including a pledge, to address ethical workplace and communal space behavior;
• Awareness and education to support organizational and culture change throughout the community;
• Policies and procedures to prevent and respond effectively to sexual harassment, gender bias, sexual orientation discrimination and their related abuses of power; and
• Training and support to help organizations create cultures of fairness and civility.

Organizations and their leadership must hold themselves and each other accountable for enacting the changes we need to see. We must begin addressing the structural inequalities and power dynamics that have allowed harassment and abuse to take root. We must live up to the values within Jewish tradition that call upon us to raise our voices and lead where our community and society have fallen short.

In the coming weeks, we will be rolling out a pledge, working groups, resources and opportunities for more people to get involved with this important initiative. We hope you will consider joining us. (Join our email list to receive updates.)

Together, we can create a Jewish community that is safe, respectful and equitable for all.

Rabbi Elka Abrahamson, The Wexner Foundation
Sharon Alpert, Nathan Cummings Foundation
Robert Bank, American Jewish World Service
Guila Benchimol, Jumpstart Labs
Elizabeth Berman, BBYO
Jamie Allen Black, Jewish Women’s Foundation of New York
Gali Cooks, Leading Edge
Barbara Dobkin, Dobkin Family Foundation
Lisa Eisen, Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation
Barry Finestone, Jim Joseph Foundation
Jeremy Fingerman, Foundation for Jewish Camp
Martin Kaminer, Kaminer Family Foundation
Nancy Kaufman and Jody Rabhan, National Council of Jewish Women
Idit Klein, Keshet
Mimi Kravetz and Sheila Katz, Hillel International
Rachel Levin, Righteous Persons Foundation
Sharon Masling
Yavilah McCoy, Dimensions Educational Consulting
Rachel Garbow Monroe, Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Foundation
Stefanie Rhodes and Jenna Weinberg, Slingshot
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg, Avodah
Tilly Shames, University of Michigan Hillel
Jerry Silverman, The Jewish Federations of North America
Andrés Spokoiny, Jewish Funders Network
Charlene Seidle, Leichtag Foundation
Lori Weinstein, Jewish Women International
Rabbi Mary Zamore, Women’s Rabbinic Network

source: eJewishPhilanthropy

A new coalition of national Jewish organizations is mobilizing to send groups to help Houston with urgent and ongoing recovery needs in the wake of Hurricane Harvey.

The Leadership Coalition for Jewish Service was founded to mobilize for Houston, which remains in need of recovery support five months after the devastating hurricane that dumped more than four feet of rain on the Texas city over four days in August.

The new coalition is made up of BBYO, Hillel International, JDC Entwine, Moishe House, OneTable, Repair the World and the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation. It is partnering with the Jewish Federation of Greater Houston to form #ActNowHouston, an effort to place volunteer groups within ongoing recovery work coordinated by on-the-ground national and local agencies. The volunteers will aid some of the most vulnerable and underserved communities in the city, according to the coalition.

The coalition, which is facilitated by Repair the World, also is supported by the William Davidson Foundation, Marcus Foundation and Jim Joseph Foundation.

Damage from Hurricane Harvey resulted in nearly 200,000 homes flooded, including more than 2,000 of Houston’s 26,000 Jewish households, and the closure of entire residential and commercial sectors of the city. Thousands of Houston families remain in temporary housing, and nonprofit organizations either shut down or operating under severe constraints.

Since the hurricane, hundreds of volunteers from Jewish communities across the country have self-mobilized and headed to Houston to offer their service. Coalition organizers hope that #ActNowHouston will help extend national awareness of the continuing need in Houston, as well as lower the costs and difficulty of volunteering.

The webpage offers groups limited subsidies to assist with travel costs to Houston, as well as underwriting groups’ service while in Houston.

Tasks to be carried out by the volunteers include help removing damaged household items and sanitizing homes; package food and deliver essentials to the elderly or homebound; work with individuals coping with ongoing hardship; and assist local residents in navigating available resources.

“Hurricane Harvey brought unprecedented destruction to Houston, and the Jewish community was hit especially hard,” Avital Ingber, CEO of the Jewish Federation of Greater Houston, said in a statement. “The solidarity and partnership we have experienced with Jewish organizations across the country has been energizing and revitalizing. While full recovery is expected to take years, our partnership with Act Now Houston expedites this critical work.”

Source: JTA

Kids who love Jewish overnight camp will have one more local option to choose from this summer.

Eden Village West, the first expansion of Eden Village Camp in upstate New York, will open near the Russian River in Sonoma County on June 19 for the first of three sessions focused on farming, food, outdoor education and homesteading crafts. And, of course, building Jewish connections.

Its debut will bring the total number of Jewish overnight summer camps in Northern California to six — a veritable feast for Bay Area campers (and their parents). According to the S.F.-based Jewish Community Federation, some 3,500 children, teens and young adults attended Jewish overnight camps in Northern California last year.

Eden Village West is the region’s third specialty camp to open in recent years, following on the heels of the JCC Maccabi Sports Camp (2014) and Camp Ramah in Northern California (2016). The former, affiliated with the JCC Association of North America, is held on the campus of Menlo College in Atherton; the latter, part of the camping arm of the Conservative movement, is located in Watsonville about a mile from the shores of Monterey Bay.

These newer options have only added to the rush of youth who have flocked to the area’s more traditional Jewish residential summer camps: Camp Tawonga (near Yosemite), Camp Newman (Santa Rosa) and Camp Be’chol Lashon (Petaluma).

Camp Tawonga, in operation for 92 years, “reaches the broadest possible range of families,” according to its website, “because it is not limited to any particular movement or affiliation.” This year’s sessions, from June 17 through Aug. 14, are for kids entering the second through 10^th grades, and there are also six popular family camps on tap this summer and fall, each lasting four days.

Camp Newman, which will be held at Cal State University’s Maritime Academy in Vallejo this summer after losing its home facility in the Tubbs Fire last October, is affiliated with the Union of Reform Judaism. Newman is entering its 21^st year, though it celebrated a 70^th anniversary last year in conjunction with the famed, 185-acre Camp Swig, which shut down in 2003, and its predecessor, Camp Saratoga.

Camp Be’chol Lashon, which will be holding its 10^th annual camp this summer, provides a camp experience to Jews of color and mixed-race backgrounds. A program of S.F.-based nonprofit Be’chol Lashon (In Every Tongue), which seeks to grow and strengthen the Jewish people through ethnic, cultural and racial inclusiveness, the camp draws 8- to 18-year-olds from throughout the United States to its three sessions, which are crammed into a fairly short window (July 22 to Aug. 12 this year).

All of the camps seem to be quite popular. Enrollment was up at the five existing camps in 2016 and 2017, and the addition of Eden Village West is expected to add to that growth, positioning the Bay Area as a prime location for Jewish residential summer camp.

Jamie Simon, Tawonga’s executive director, said her camp had a sizable waitlist last year and that she expects the same this coming summer, for which she gave a tip of the cap to the new camps.

“If anything, they help enrollment,” she said. “Our community is seeing the impact of Jewish camp more than ever as the options in the area increase.”

Specialty camps are the newest addition to the field of Jewish camping, with two opening in the Bay Area in the last three years and a third set to join them this summer.

All three have received financial and operational support from the Foundation for Jewish Camp, the S.F.-based Jim Joseph Foundation and the Avi Chai Foundation through a program called the Foundation for Jewish Camp Specialty Camps Incubator.

The JCC Maccabi Sports Camp and Eden Village West were created directly from the incubator, while Camp Ramah received support and direction from the foundation.

Nationwide, the incubator has provided nearly $30 million for the launch and support of 17 Jewish specialty residential camps since 2010. The aim is to get more kids to camp, especially older kids and teens who might otherwise not attend but are interested in focusing on a particular interest or skill.

According to Jeremy Fingerman, CEO of the Foundation for Jewish Camp, the increase of Jewish specialty camps is a welcome addition to the Jewish camp experience, and, since 2010, they have contributed to an 18-percent spike in camp attendance across the country. These camps are bringing in new demographics of families and teenagers, he said, who are gravitating to the immersive experiences on a particular subject or activity.

“What we have done, really successfully, is helped these camps weave in Jewish culture and traditions and values, which helps the camper develop a skill and feel a part of the larger Jewish community,” Fingerman said.

It’s a win for the Bay Area as well.

“The Bay Area is such a geographically large region, and has such a diverse Jewish community, that there is space for all three of its specialty camps to attract different families from across the area,” said Aaron Saxe, program officer at the Jim Joseph Foundation, which has granted more than $27 to the Foundation for Jewish Camp for the Specialty Camps incubator and another $12 million to FJC for other programs supporting Jewish camps.

“It’s exciting to see these new offerings,” Saxe continued. “The community’s numerous year-round programs for youth help to show the demand, and these camps really can build on the success of those programs.”

Camp Ramah in Watsonville is offering campers an array of four-week “intensives” this summer: scuba diving, surfing, horseback riding and musical composition. Enrollment was up in 2017, the camp’s second year, and Rabbi Sarah Shulman, the director since Day 1, said she expects it will grow again this summer, drawing third- to 12^th-graders mostly from the Bay Area. Ramah also offers a two-week program for campers with special needs; one serves roughly fourth- to 12^th-graders with mild to moderate intellectual and developmental disabilities, the other is a vocational program for 18- to 26-year-olds.

“It has been a pleasure to be a part of the collaborative and collegial overnight Jewish camp community in Northern California with such supportive partners,” Shulman said.

The JCC Maccabi Sports Camp offers sessions of one week (“rookie”), two weeks (no catchy name) and four weeks (“all-stars”) focused on athletics and movement. The core sports for summer 2018 are baseball, basketball, soccer, tennis, lacrosse, softball, flag football and dance, and there is also a day camp option. Each day, campers who’ll be entering grades 3 through 11 have two sessions, totaling about four hours of training and games in their core sport, under the direction of experienced coaches.

Director Josh Steinharter said he, too, expects a jump in enrollment this summer after steady growth in past summers. Most of his campers come from the Bay Area, he added.

All of the camps are supportive of one another’s role in creating a strong Jewish connection among young people that will carry on for the rest of their lives.

The S.F.-based Jewish Community Federation brought camp leaders together last year to discuss this common purpose and future goals. In a vision statement they crafted, they noted that Jewish camps in Northern California “are operating at maximum capacity,” which is great because it reflects “the full diversity of our Bay Area Jewish community” and gives “every Bay Area Jewish child” an “opportunity to grow.”

Well, maybe not every child. According to Wendy Verba, a senior program officer at Federation, there are “far more kids who could attend camp than there are spots.”

A 2004 Federation study found that there were 53,000 Jewish children in its service area of San Francisco, the Peninsula, and Marin and Sonoma counties. So clearly not all of them could attend a Jewish camp.

Moreover, not every family can afford to send its kids to camp without financial help. But many kids these days are getting the chance to go to camp via incentives, discounts and programs offered by the individual camps themselves or through programs such as One Happy Camper, an initiative of the Foundation for Jewish Camp that provides need-blind grants of up to $1,000 for families sending their kids to nonprofit, mission-driven Jewish overnight camps for the first time. The Federation has a web page packed with information about camp scholarships and grants.

Similarly, Camp Newman recaps money-saving options here and Camp Tawonga does the same. Each camp uses the same title for that page on its website: “Making Camp Affordable,” and options include early sign-up discounts, discounts for first-time campers, sibling discounts and matching funds on congregational scholarships.

In general, the specialty camps have been attracting slightly older kids, said Saxe of the Jim Joseph Foundation, many who have aged out of traditional camps but want to hone a particular skill. Also, he added, many families that are not integrated into the organized Jewish community are seeking out the specialty camps and finding Jewish connection there.

The established camps have taken note. For example, URJ now offers specialty camps in leadership, art and music (for teens in grades 10-12), science and technology (grades 5-10) and sports (grades 4-11), though none are offered at URJ Camp Newman in the Bay Area. Tawonga has a lineup of seven adventure travel “camps” called Quests; the trips, including one for girls only, last between six days and three weeks and include activities such as backpacking, rock climbing, kayaking and rafting.

Eden Village West is a welcome addition to the camp roster, several people interviewed for this article noted, providing what is being billed as the Bay Area’s first farm-to-table immersive camp experience. Indeed, Casey Yurow, camp director at Eden Village West, said other camps “have been supportive in welcoming us in.”

At Eden Village West, the plan is to let campers choose among four program areas every day: culinary arts, such as cooking and baking with organic and kosher ingredients; farming activities, such as planting seeds and milking goats; forest-related activities, such as creating shelters and tracking animals; and artistic endeavors, such as pottery, spinning wool and making syrups.

The new camp will be held on the campus of Rio Lindo Adventist Academy on the outskirts of Healdsburg, less than a quarter-mile from the Russian River. Yurow said the camp is aiming for 150 campers (kids entering grades 3 through 9) across its three two-week sessions from June 19 through July 29.

The relatively small numbers will allow everyone to get to know each other and will be a “great start,” Yurow said.

Eden Village West will receive funding and guidance for the first three years to get the camp on its feet. But Yurow said he knows it will be well received, building from the success of the New York camp and the vibrancy of the Bay Area.

The original Eden Village Camp, located 50 miles outside New York City in Putnam Valley, New York, was founded eight years ago as an “innovative, Jewish, organic farm camp,” according to its website. Located on 248 acres, the camp blends food, organic farming, wilderness adventures, nature and science “all in a vibrant, kind Jewish community.”

“There is so much demand for the kind of Earth-based Judaism and loving kindness that Eden Village Camp creates,” the camp’s founding director, Yoni Stadlin, told JTA in 2016. “I believe we are changing the world one camper at a time, and this expansion [to Healdsburg] will allow us to double our impact on the Jewish adults of tomorrow.”

Added Yurow: “We have realized that camp really works in the Jewish community. Having an immersive experience of being in a community and being away from home provides kids with a chance to develop themselves as people and as leaders, and to experience a kind of Jewish life and community that’s hard to emulate outside of the camp setting.”

Source: J – The Jewish News of Northern California 

JPRO Network has a go-to ice-breaker: “What is something that you learned along the way in your career that you wish you had known sooner?” Responses run the gamut: work-life integration, negotiation skills, how to build stronger collegial relationships, and much more.

While our history dates back to 1899, we sometimes affectionately refer to the organization as a 120-year old startup. A year ago our Board and staff set out to reimagine our work to strengthen our field by serving the professionals who power our organizations. As JPRO’s mission is to support all those who work for the Jewish nonprofit sector in the United States and Canada, we listen carefully to make sure we understand the needs of our community. Our listening tour and poll gave us resounding feedback that early- and mid-career professionals need more guidance from seasoned colleagues.

With that data in hand, we set out to build a platform to offer confidential, free, easy-to-access advice to JPRO members. With generous support from the Jim Joseph Foundation, JPRO Network is piloting WellAdvised, which offers JPRO members one-time, one-hour advising sessions on a focused area of career-based inquiry or problem solving.

What is WellAdvised?

During a six-month pilot, fourteen exemplary professionals will volunteer their time to advise their colleagues. JPRO members can sign up online for a free one-hour advising session on one of sixteen topics.

After the WellAdvised session is scheduled, advisees answer a few brief intake questions to enable their advisor to be prepared to help make the most of the advising session. Following the session, advisees are asked to respond to a quick evaluation.

Walking the Walk

We believe that what an organization does on the inside shapes its impact in the world. JPRO seeks to increase the extent to which professionals can draw from the well of wisdom within our professional community, so we started there with our pilot design. We wanted to innovate, so we turned to UpStart and were lucky to be guided by Aliza Mazor, Chief Field-Building Officer. And just as those who take advantage of WellAdvised will benefit from advice from savvy colleagues, we turned to 20 brilliant professionals whom we called our Design Team, consulting with them at critical moments in the design. We learned that having a “menu” of advising topics makes this offering more inviting, that confidentiality is critical, and that the opportunity to make cross-field connections is meaningful – and much more.

Every Pilot is an Opportunity for Learning

Pilots are all about learning. Here are a few of the big questions that we are bringing to the test drive of WellAdvised:

• Will those who participate in WellAdvised feel more supported as members of our field?
• Can one-hour, one-time advising help advisees identify useful next steps on an issue or opportunity that they are working through?
• While maintaining advisee confidentiality, what are some of the trends and themes that our advisors are hearing? How can we share and leverage this learning to best serve professionals across the field?

Anyone who works for a JPRO–affiliated organization is a JPRO member and can sign up to Be Advised. There are more JPRO pilots coming on the heels of this one including:

• An online series in partnership with the Berman Jewish Policy Archive;
• The Management Center’s Managing to Change the World course, offered at a discount, in partnership with UJA Federation of New York’s Wiener Center for Leadership and Learning.

Sign up for the JPRO newsletter to be the first to hear about all that we offer. And if your organization isn’t yet an affiliate, it’s quick and easy for your organization to join JPRO’s growing network of 160 organizations and over 4,000 members.

Jeffrey Finkelstein is the Board President of JPRO Network and serves as the CEO of the Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh. Ilana Aisen is the Executive Director of JPRO Network and can be reached at [email protected].

source: eJewishPhilanthropy

Ayeka founder Aryeh Ben David says that when it comes to learning about Judaism, schools should be teaching connection over content

NEW YORK — Eighteen months ago, students at the Bi-Cultural Day School in Stamford, Connecticut, received a relatively flat account of Moses and the 12 spies.

They learned the who, what, where, when and possibly the why of the story: Moses sent out 12 spies to do a little reconnaissance in the land of Canaan. Ten came back and scared the daylights out of everyone, and only two, Joshua and Caleb, challenged the majority opinion.

End of lesson.

And while that’s fine if the goal is to win Jewish Trivial Pursuit, it’s not ideal if the goal is to help students deepen their spiritual and Jewish identities.

According to longtime educator Aryeh Ben David, quantity shouldn’t trump quality — especially when it comes to Judaic studies. Yet, for too long Jewish educators have pushed content, rather than connectedness, said the founder of the Jerusalem-based Ayeka: The Center for Soulful Education.

Founded in 2006 with the goal of reframing Jewish education, the non-profit’s name is the biblical word for “where are you.” Ayeka provides learning tracks for educators, parents, and individuals with online and in-person options in the United States and Israel. The idea is to help teachers breathe life into Jewish text study.

The organization has also published two books, “Becoming Soulful Educators” and the “Ayeka Haggadah: Hearing Your Own Voice.”

“We’re offering a paradigm shift in the way we teach. Students won’t remember what they are not personally connected to,” Ben David said. “Ayeka looks at Judaism as a vehicle for becoming our better selves, and it can’t be an intellectual process. Learning can’t be just about content and memorization. They [students] have to own it in their own lives.”

And that’s been the result at Bi-Cultural.

Since the introduction of Ayeka, the students are asked to consider what they would do if they had a minority opinion, said Michal Smart, director of Jewish studies at the school. Then they are asked to think about something they might be experiencing.

Maybe it’s peer pressure to do something they don’t want to do, or something they know is wrong. Teachers then ask the class to think about one small step they could take to change their situation. They will be asked to journal about it for homework and then, perhaps a week later, teachers will check back to see how they are doing.

Illustrative: First grade students sit in a classroom on their first day of school at a school. (Hadas Parush/Flash90)

“It’s building community in the classroom. Judaism isn’t just about more information. Torah is a teaching of life and if you don’t ask those questions then you just a read a story. You have to put yourself in the story and put the story inside you,” said Smart.

Bi-Cultural was one of the first day schools to implement Ayeka. Now with the help of hundreds of thousands of dollars in multi-year grants from four major American Jewish foundations, including the Jim Joseph Foundation, Ayeka will expand its Soulful Professional Development program in up to eight Hebrew day schools in North America.

The grant will go towards training Judaic studies teachers to implement its Soulful Education pedagogy in their classrooms, as well as to coach colleagues in their schools in Ayeka’s methodology. The multi-year program will include retreats, on-site coaching sessions, and individual mentoring and webinars for staff, as well as for the administrations of the selected day schools.

Illustrative: school children in class. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)

“Jewish learning can be both a powerful and deeply personal experience that adds genuine meaning to one’s life. But the Jim Joseph Foundation knows that these experiences are only effective when facilitated by well-trained and well-resourced educators,” said Stacie Cherner, senior program officer from the Jim Joseph Foundation.

Two teachers from each day school that will participate in Ayeka’s Jim Joseph Foundation Spiritual Education Program will undergo training, which can last up to a year. Once they complete training they will help implement the method in their school.

“This isn’t just another tool in the tool box. It’s not like going to a seminar for the day and then pulling out what you learned if nothing else is working,” said Rabbi Yehoshua Looks, COO of Ayeka. “What students need from their teachers is a degree of vulnerability. The teacher has to be present. They have to be affected by the material too. If Judaism comes across as preaching, we lose students.”

Yehoshua Looks, COO of Ayeka, talks with educators. (Courtesy: Ayeka.)

Ben David has worked for decades to make traditional Jewish learning personally relevant.

Born in the United States, he moved to Israel in 1978. After receiving his rabbinical ordination from the Israeli rabbinate, he served as director of spiritual education at Jerusalem’s Pardes Institute from 1987-2007. He also served as rabbinical educational consultant for Hillel International from 2004-2007.

In 2006, he founded Ayeka. “At first, some thought the idea was flaky. Some thought it was a gimmick. We’re not touchy-feely and I don’t play the guitar,” Ben David said, smiling.

Kidding aside, Ben David said he sees too many students disconnect with Judaism and what they learned after their formal education ends.

In recent years there has been a push for more experiential learning, taking students outside the classroom for activities. But Ben David thinks that sends the wrong message.

“It sends a deleterious message, a subliminal message that what takes place in the classroom is boring. We need to make what happens in the classroom as meaningful,” he said.

source: Times of Israel

An intensive program focused on sports is launching Atlanta’s effort to connect with Jewish teens.

The Atlanta Jewish Teen Initiative is launching programs more than a year after the Jim Joseph Foundation announced it was giving an Atlanta partnership $2.1 million over five years to engage more teenagers with the Jewish community.

The initiative is a collaboration of the Jewish Federation of Greater Atlanta, the Marcus JCC and the Atlanta Rabbinical Association under the leadership of Hope Chernak, who arrived in mid-April as the executive director of the $4.2 million effort (half from the Jim Joseph Foundation, half from local matching funds).

The initiative focuses on high-schoolers in the hope of boosting Jewish teen engagement and education throughout the community with new programs of interest to teens. Examples include an arts program, a seminar with lawyers and activists on how Jewish values inform social justice, and a possible seminar on civil rights in partnership with the National Center for Civil and Human Rights.

Each program will be taught through a Jewish lens to foster teens’ connection to Judaism and will operate during spring, summer, fall and winter breaks from school.

A national collaboration began in 2013 after the release of the Jim Joseph Foundation report “Effective Strategies for Educating and Engaging Jewish Teens,” whose goal is to connect tens of thousands of teens to meaningful Jewish learning experiences.

The San Francisco-based foundation picked 10 cities — based on their specific characteristics and history of communal partnerships — to participate and committed more than $29 million to support the resulting Jewish Teen Education & Engagement Funder Collaborative.

Amanda Abrams, the chief program and innovation officer at the Marcus JCC, said Atlanta was selected because religion is more of a normal practice in the South than in the other nine locations: Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Cincinnati, Denver/Boulder, Los Angeles, New York, San Diego and San Francisco.

Abrams said Atlanta’s initiative has been well received so far and was acknowledged by a Jewish Federation in New Jersey, which requested further information after hearing a presentation by Abrams during the General Assembly of Federations in Los Angeles in November.

“They thought what we shared was very informative, and my hope is that what we’ve done in Atlanta will transfer to other communities, at least in the planning process,” she said.

Input from the community and collaborations with existing organizations are important, Abrams said, as the initiative looks for sustainability early instead of waiting until the grant runs out after five years to seek new funding. The initiative therefore is flexible and open to change along the way.

The AJTI has canvassed in various communities, including Alpharetta and intown, to reach as many teens as possible. Although areas inside and outside the Perimeter present a challenge for the initiative, Chernak said AJTI is prepared to cross any boundary.

The Marcus JCC is working behind the scenes to implement the initiative by providing human resources, technical and financial support, supervision, and management. Federation is leveraging the funding with aid from the Jim Joseph Foundation and the Marcus JCC.

The ARA is serving as a resource to the initiative’s staff and volunteers by providing Jewish educational components and having members, including The Temple’s Rabbi Peter Berg, serve on the AJTI board. He said: “I am very proud because the AJTI is our community at its finest. We are working to not only offer great programing for teens that are not involved in Jewish life, but also toward a positive goal in the community.”

Chernak said the initiative remains in the pilot stage but is reaching out to agencies, synagogues and student clubs to schedule one-on-one meetings and explain the initiative.

“We are not trying to become another youth program but in fact support and provide any resources and … fill in a gap where students are currently not involved,” Chernak said.

AJTI’s first intensive session for teens, JumpSpark Sports, is scheduled for January and will provide a behind-the-scenes look at Atlanta’s sports industry.

AJTI also launched JumpSpark Professional for the development of communal professionals working with teens. A professional seminar in January will feature a discussion about teen behaviors and challenges.

The initiative hopes to create a pocket of communities with 15 to 25 kids each who will get to know one another and learn together. The initiative also wants to establish a leadership track in a year to help students learn what it means to be mentors.

Teens can learn more about the initiative at www.jumpsparkatl.org.

“Teens are at a critical stage of their life when they are building up their Jewish identity, and although we have great programs in the community, such as BBYO, there are still plenty of teens who have no Jewish connection, and having more options that are different and unique is important,” Federation CEO Eric Robbins said.

Abrams added, “It’s sometimes hard for people to understand what the AJTI is because there’s truly nothing like this that exists in Atlanta. It’s such an innovative way of serving Jewish teens.”

Source: Atlanta Jewish Times

What started as a loose movement of Jewish organic farming and back-to-the-land groups has quickly become a well-established player in Jewish life, especially in the Bay Area: the movement for Jewish Outdoor, Food, Farming & Environmental Education — or JOFEE.

“The Bay Area has increasingly become its own hub for JOFEE work,” said Yoshi Silverstein, who heads the JOFEE fellowship for Jewish educators for the New York-based Jewish environmental non-profit Hazon.

The JOFEE movement has strong roots in the Bay Area, thanks to organizations such as Berkeley’s Urban Adamah and Wilderness Torah, both recognized as leaders in the field.

In January, Hazon will launch a new JOFFEE training program for mid-career professionals. The new JOFEE Leaders Institute is designed to help people who are already established in Jewish non-profit work, but need help networking and exchanging best practices around the new area of interest.

“It became clear about a year ago there was a real lack in professional opportunities for mid-career JOFEE professionals,” said Adam Berman, executive director of Berkeley’s Urban Adamah.

The Leaders Institute will provide 18 people, two in the Bay Area this year, with professional training through retreats and webinars, as well as give participants a stipend to use on professional development events.

The new program joins an existing yearlong fellowship for people under 32 that places fellows in organizations like the Bay Area’s Camp Tawonga, Urban Adamah and Wilderness Torah, where they organize programs around topics like food justice and the environment.

One of those fellows, Leora Cockrell, 26, is spending this year at Camp Tawonga as the garden and farm coordinator, a new position.

Cockrell, a former Tawonga camper herself, did hands-on garden work and teaching during the summer and trained other camp staffers during the off-season.

Bringing her training in sustainable agriculture to the Jewish camp that she’d always loved was a “really beautiful melding of two things I wanted in my life,” Cockrell said.

Silverstein considers the fellowship, now in its second year, a big success. Programs created by JOFEE fellows have reached 37,000 people, he said.

The term JOFEE was created in 2013 as part of a study commissioned by the San Francisco-based Jim Joseph Foundation and others to track the growth of programs connecting Jewish life to sustainability and environmentalism. The report, issued in 2014, found that the niche movement was a booming field with the potential to revitalize Jewish identity and build community.

“Seeing all these pieces together made us feel like it warranted an investment in this area,” said Steven Green, director of grants management at the Jim Joseph Foundation.

The foundation has provided over $7.5 million to Hazon for JOFEE work, including the young professionals fellowship. The new mid-career program is sponsored by the Ohio-based Lippman Kanfer Foundation for Living Torah.

“The JOFEE field is happening,” said Berman. “It’s growing. There’s more demand for it than professionals that know how to do it.”

Source: J – The Jewish News of Northern California

Sometimes you roll out a project, look back, and think about all the things you now know – and how you would do it differently if given the opportunity to try again. For us, designing FindYourSummer.org – a massive, searchable, filterable database for parents and teens in the Greater New York area to find Jewish summer experiences – has been one of those projects; one that we’d like to address publicly.

Professionals in the Jewish nonprofit sector embark on ambitious website projects all the time. They often collaborate with funders to build portals that drive traffic, create useful digital experiences, and ambitiously aim to measure and prove that these new offerings result in greater in-person Jewish engagement. In our case, FindYourSummer.org was pitched as a cornerstone of the New York Teen Initiative, a grant-funded partnership designed to increase the number of teens enrolling in Jewish summer experiences, jointly supported by UJA-Federation of New York and the Jim Joseph Foundation. Its lead operator is The Jewish Education Project. Through a candid behind-the-scenes look at our successes and challenges to date, we hope this debrief can inform thinking and approaches that others in the Jewish nonprofit sector might consider as they build platforms to reach and engage all kinds of Jewish families.

Consultants Need to Consult on More than Just Tech

We are working with our third consultant since the project launched about two years ago. Why? For many reasons.

For one thing, we experienced a learning curve on how to effectively communicate what we envisioned the website being, how we thought it should operate, and what it should look like. As program and planning professionals, communicating our vision to tech people proved challenging. For example, we tasked the consultants with building a calendar for the site. They built a lovely looking calendar. But it wasn’t functional in the way that takes into account something we learned about our target: teens and families piece their summers together, with a mix of many experiences. We expected a feature where parents could upload their existing summer schedule and map out and slot in the Jewish summer experiences that worked in specific timeframes. The calendar, which works in this way now, did not have this feature initially.

Today, our new consultants are more than just “tech implementers.” We sought out developers who could bridge our conceptual functional needs with a broader vision, and ultimately build the site with both of these elements in mind. They are collaborative partners who help us think realistically about deadlines. Designing and branding a beautiful website is not enough for success. When dealing with a database that you want people to come to, and return to, it has to be extremely responsive to the audience’s needs and user-friendly. The right consultants bring that to bear.

Learn Directly from Audiences

Due to a 10 month time-frame to launch, and a budget to adhere to, we had to think creatively about how to quickly and efficiently garner suggestions from our target audience parents and teens and hear directly from them about how a site like this would be most helpful and usable. To gather feedback, we relied on two principles:

• Carpool focus groups. These are exactly what they sound like. We used the opportunity of a captive audience of teens in a car to ask questions about the branding of the site. What kind of messages resonate with them? We shared initial branding ideas to see what people preferred; the feedback was very helpful.
• Hearing from the Less Engaged. We really wanted feedback as well from less-engaged teens and families. This is a challenge since they are inherently not at as many events or often even as known in the community. We simply asked to be connected to friends of friends … of friends and jumped at the opportunities to get feedback.

Based on these methods, two points came across loud and clear:

• Not too Jewish. What we learned from people informed much of what you see on the site. In particular, we were intentional about the site not feeling “too Jewish,” which may be a turn off for those less engaged in Jewish life through traditional institutions. The site name, FindYourSummer.org, and the logo, for example are not explicitly “Jewish.” Even some of the search filters like “kosher friendly” and “Shabbat friendly” are somewhat understated.
• Teens are global citizens. Teens have grown up in a time when boundaries and borders are not limiting. They don’t expect a website like this to be limiting either. Rather, the site is an opportunity to explore and discover programs that may not exist in a teen’s particular local universe.

Your End User May Be Someone Else

Research on Jewish teen experiences widely points to teens wanting to create and take ownership of their experiences. That said, our focus groups pointed to this being aspirational: when it comes to finding Jewish summer programs, parents often do the legwork. Initially, we envisioned the website would be for teens and that it would include Buzzfeed style quizzes that are popular among them, along with similar interactive features. When we learned that our core audience is parents, this “interactive play value” was ultimately not necessary; we pivoted and introduced alternate features that added utility. Our recently released Summer Planner feature allows the user to save experiences they are interested in and share them along with a customized message. This way a parent can scope out programs and send to their teens, and vice versa. The feature also allows the user to plot the dates for these programs on a calendar. Soon we will roll out a feature that allows users to directly communicate with the programs they are exploring or with which they intend to register.

Allow the Site to Grow and Change

Unlike a hard copy catalog of activities, a website is inherently a living, fluid platform. We gave ourselves the space to change elements of it as we learned what worked and what didn’t.

• To login, or not to login. Initially we did not want the site to include a login portal, thinking that would be a barrier to easy use and access. But we found that a lot of people would simply visit the site, look, and leave. So, we decided to have a login feature with an incentive for the user: allowing visitors to save their favorite programs. In turn, the login allows us to better track our audience, follow-up with them, and understand how they are coming to the site and using it on a much deeper level.
• Heavy Lifting Continues After Site Launch. For this type of website, “Day 1” in many respects is when the site launches. From then, new time-intensive concerns come into play – like keeping listings up-to-date and accurate. We reached out to all kinds of programs and providers of Jewish summer experiences, and certainly had to sell some of them on the value of being included on the site. Engaging local branches of national organizations can be particularly challenging; they have their own set of rules and restrictions. Through patience and willingness to “hold hands” with organizations as they first started posting their information onto the site, we have been able to populate the site with over 370 programs that represent a diverse variety of teen interests. Moreover, we created a login portal that allows organizations to enter and update their listings as often as they like.
• Market to audiences. Without a dedicated user base, there’s no point in investing the significant time and resources it takes to develop a site like this. To best reach our audience of parents and teens looking for unique Jewish summer experiences, our marketing strategy includes Facebook, Instagram, and Google advertisements, organic social media posts, contests, digital and physical mailings, and seasonal print collateral.

Have a vision beyond the immediate need. While we designed the site with New York top of mind, we always understood that the site could grow to be something bigger. Certainly teens and families all over the country have a desire to “find their summer.” So while the site is now accessible to all, in the future, it could be customized with portals for communities way beyond a regional audience. One inquiry from France resulted in two siblings traveling abroad to participate in a Specialty Israel Program that they learned about through our website. We don’t use this analogy lightly, but creating FindYourSummer.org took a lot of effort to bring to birth. Three and half years since we launched the New York Teen Initiative, we recognize the enormous progress we have made and how much we’ve learned about the value our perspective can lend to the design process. We hope other communities, too, can, look to the site as a model when designing websites or other portals for digital engagement. Creating a website is an empowering experience, but in this line of work, we all care enough to know that tools are a means to a greater, shared vision of meaningful engagement.

Susan Holzman Wachsstock is Director of the New York Teen Initiative at The Jewish Education Project. Rebecca Ruberg is Project Director of the New York Teen Initiative. Melanie L. Schneider is Senior Planning Executive, with the Department of Jewish Life at UJA-Federation of NY.

Source: eJewishPhilanthropy