10 Lessons Over 10 years: Jewish Teen Education and Engagement, Forever Changed
September 24th, 2024
Over a decade ago, the Jim Joseph Foundation convened more than a dozen local and national funders of Jewish teen programming for a series of discussions on expanding teen involvement in Jewish life. We recognized that adolescents are a critical demographic and adolescence is a moment of inflection. Moreover, teens are holders of great insights and have the ability to articulate them and the realities they hope those insights can create. To paraphrase Joel 3:1, while those of us around the table had dreams, we knew it would be teens holding the vision to move us forward. We felt and continue to believe that teens are the futurists and optimists that our world needs.
These early conversations, which included teens themselves, taught us a lot — namely, how much more we still needed to learn. As a result, we commissioned groundbreaking research to identify and unpack strategies from both the non-Jewish and Jewish worlds are most effective in educating and engaging teens. This research ultimately gave us the knowledge to design responsive local teen initiatives in 10 communities across the country, under the banner of the Jewish Teen Education & Engagement Funder Collaborative. United by the shared aspiration of creating and nurturing contemporary approaches to Jewish teen education, engagement and growth, this new network of national and local funders and practitioners worked side by side with teens. Together, they reimagined the youth-serving ecosystem in these communities of varying sizes and demographic composition, with a commitment to sharing whatever unvarnished lessons they would learn.
read the full piece at eJewish Philanthropy