As we approach the end of any year, I customarily take time to reflect on the Foundation’s efforts over the previous twelve months. In 2015, with dedicated grantee partners, the Foundation continued to pursue its vision of “increasing numbers of Jews engaging in Jewish life and learning.” There were landmark new grants; grants that concluded with goals exceeded; and evaluations that both offered key lessons and demonstrated outcomes achieved. 2015 also marked our tenth year of grantmaking, which the Foundation celebrated by honoring our founder and highlighting the important work of grantees and evaluators over the decade.

In this, my final blog of the year, I want to share some exciting developments around the Foundation’s Evaluators’ Consortium, comprised of the small number of highly skilled evaluators and researchers with whom the Foundation works. The Consortium’s efforts most likely are not well known to you. Yet the Consortium’s work is deeply important to the Foundation’s efforts and potentially could to lead to novel results in the measurement and assessment of programs in the field of Jewish education.

As we noted, the initial goal in forming the Evaluators’ Consortium evolved into something bigger: moving toward a common set of measures (survey items, interview schedules, frameworks for documenting distinctive features of programs) to be developed and used as outcomes and indicators of Jewish learning and growth for teens and young adults. The Consortium’s convening at the Foundation last month charted new territory for the Foundation in this important direction. For a day and a half, we explored how research and evaluation methods in other fields can be applied to the measurement of Jewish learning and growth. Participants and presenters included leading scholars and researchers from both the Jewish and secular education worlds.

We were fortunate to hear from Professor Christian Smith of Notre Dame University. Dr. Smith began the National Study on Youth and Religion in 1999, examining religious formation, identity, and engagement among predominantly (but not exclusively) Christian youth. His analysis of the habits of religious teens and their families—both Jewish and non-Jewish—along with his own evolution as a researcher examining this area were insightful and certainly will inform the Consortium’s future efforts.

Ms. Cinnamon Daniel, Director of Research & Evaluation for Girl Scouts of Northern California, shared the Scouts’ efforts to develop measurable outcomes across the broad array of scouting programs. Ms. Daniel cautioned about collecting too much data, while noting that data utilization over the long run holds genuine promise for improving the Girl Scout experience.

Professor Anne Colby of Stanford discussed her work in moral development of adolescents. She reviewed several research methodologies the Consortium could consider adapting. Professor Tomas Jimenez, also of Stanford, shared his highly regarded research on Mexican American identity, including that community’s own challenges with assimilation.

The presentation laden with the greatest implications for the Foundation was made by Professor Michael Feuer, Dean of the George Washington University (GWU) Graduate School of Education & Human Development, and Dr. Naomi Chudowsky of TrueScore Consulting. With funding received from the Jim Joseph Foundation, GWU currently is developing a common set of long term outcomes and shared metrics to improve the Foundation’s ability to look at programs and outcomes across grantees and over time. Meeting participants were especially excited to learn about Feuer and Chudowsky’s team’s plan to develop an online menu—in consultation with evaluation experts and practitioners—from which grantees can choose to measure their program outcomes. This would inherently mean that organizations would use common language and measures, a critical step for the field.

Frederick M. Hess, resident scholar and Director of Education Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute, observes:

The right mix of experts can help identify tensions, incentives and the contours of possible solutions…Expertise has a terrifically useful place [in problem solving], as long as we understand what the experts actually know, which is how to do specific, concrete tasks right.
– Hess, Frederick. “You say ‘expert,’ I say…not so much.” I used to think…And I now I think… Ed. Richard F. Elmore. pg. 79.

With that principle in mind, a diversity of great minds is critical to the Consortium’s evolution and its ability to pursue its ambitious mission. If you would like an in-depth look at this evolution, please see Cindy Reich’s abridged version of her dissertation, which is a case study on the Consortium. It is an informative document for the Foundation and, I believe, the broader field.

The Evaluator Consortium’s efforts are not front and center in the Foundation’s philanthropy. But the Consortium’s contributions to the Jim Joseph Foundation’s efforts to continuously improve its strategic grantmaking are critical.  What began as a collection of researchers and evaluators with an experimental idea of goals evolved in 2015 into a focused, collaborative effort that I believe puts us on the brink of producing highly valuable tools for Jewish education. Evaluators and grantees working closely with Jim Joseph Foundation professionals bring focus and sophistication to the Foundation’s grantmaking.

Wishing you a Happy New Year.

“When schools, families, and community groups work together to support learning, children tend to do better in school, stay in school longer, and like school more.[1]” This finding from a 2002 study affirmed a philosophy already held by many that guided significant national education policy and programs. Head Start, a program endorsed by President Lyndon Johnson in 1965, incorporated a family component[2]. Today, the idea is widely accepted that parental involvement in students’ educational pursuits provides lasting benefits for the students. Disparate competing programs such as No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top[3] incorporate this idea as a cornerstone.

While parental involvement in secular learning is almost a given, this has not been the case in religious education.  Former Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks of Great Britain describes this as sending “mixed messages” to our children about the value of education[4].  He noted that many parents expect their children to place importance on Jewish learning and practice for the sake of tradition even when the parents choose not to engage in particularly Jewish practice.

Strategies for Student Success

The Southwest Education Development laboratory lists the following two items as a subsection of recommended strategies to achieve student success:

• “Engage [parents] at school so that they understand what their children are doing”
• “Give [parents] a voice in what happens to their children”

While belonging to a booster club or even a Parent Teacher Association at school provides valuable connections, these affiliations do not offer opportunities for parents’ deep engagement and understanding about a child’s secular education.  Rather, meeting with individual teachers, working through homework problems with students, and even developing formal relationships between families and their schools can achieve more lasting success for the students and understanding for the parents. Moreover, these extra steps also show the value and importance of the education to both children and parents.

In a religious school context, parents might belong to a church or synagogue, but that membership does not inherently lead to their engagement in a child’s spiritual journey and education. Parents, instead, must be proactive and seek opportunities to be deeply involved in this learning.  Engaging children around their education both at the Jewish institution and at home is a core part of this process.

A Case Study on Parental Involvement in Education

In the field of Jewish education, Wilderness Torah—an organization committed to connecting individuals to Judaism through the environment—offers a case study on the importance, evolution, and potential of deep parental-child-teacher engagement in learning. Its B’naiture program for students in grades 6 and 7 was designed as a complement for religious education[5].  The ultimate objectives of Wilderness Torah’s program design and their early adaption to engage parents more deeply, provides profound insight into how parent involvement in children’s learning can entirely transform religious education.

B’naiture 1.0 – Taking Youth on Journey

Wilderness Torah created B’naiture as a response to the call for “life-centered” youth education— experiences that deal with the whole person and her or his set of human concerns, as Jonathan Woocher explained in “Redesigning Jewish Education for the 21st Century” (2008). The desire for these experiences often comes in the early teen years, during that critical phase between childhood and adolescence, when youth need help building confidence in themselves as unique individuals. Wilderness Torah developed B’naiture with this guiding principle and the understanding that focusing on soul-development at this time of passage in life is essential. Thus, the program prioritizes self-awareness, self-responsibility, and the discovery and empowerment of one’s own inherent gifts.

This all plays out over the course of the two-year program in—as the name implies—nature. Participants embark on a journey during which they learn hands-on survival skills such as fire-making, and do-it-yourself skills such as making shofars and mezuzahs from raw materials. It also challenges them to face fears, expand their beliefs of what’s possible and share their hearts around the fire with peers and adult mentors. All of this is framed and woven together by designing the experience according to the Hebrew calendar throughout the year and framing all the activities with Jewish stories, teachings from the Torah and Pirkeh Avot, and Jewish prayers and song.

While after seven years, B’naiture’s life-centered model has proven successful—parents consistently report their B’naiture graduate teens demonstrate high levels of newfound confidence, respect, accountability around the house and at school, and self-responsibility—Wilderness Torah faced an unexpected challenge at the program’s inception. Some parents were not ready for the changes their children exhibited during program participation. As a result, over the program’s first two years, B’naiture had nearly a 30% dropout rate, in many cases because of parent resistance.

B’naiture 2.0 – Parents Join the Journey

Wilderness Torah inevitably wanted to know why parents held this sentiment and what, if anything, could be done to overcome the challenge. The answer to both questions affirms the theory that parents and children together are part of the education process.

Historically, in traditional societies “rites of passage” were all-family, often all-community events because the passage out of childhood is not just experienced by the child. It is also experienced by the parents and the community. Parents need to feel that they are supporting the transformation of their child into adolescence. This is part of their process of embracing their own “loss” of their child to adolescence. For a variety of reasons, if parents feel left out of this critical stage, they may unconsciously “sabotage” this life experience for their child process.

After absorbing this information, Wilderness Torah conceptualized its solution—a parent track that takes parents on the B’naiture journey. Now, parents participate in an opening 3-day camping trip where they learn about rites of passage, what changes to expect in their child, learn skills and reflect upon their own experience when they were their child’s age. How were they met or not met at this life transition? What do they need to be able to fully support a healthy transition for their child? Parents form a supportive parent group that meets periodically throughout the year to learn some skills B’naiture teaches their children, to learn Torah relevant to the rite of passage, and to provide on-going parent-group to understand how to support their child.

The creation of this parents’ track has been a game changer. The B’naiture drop-out rate has shrunk to a nominal number each year and parents’ involvement has made this work even more transformative. Children feel fully supported and parents feel a part of this important developmental stage of their children’s lives. As one parent, Jenn Rader, commented:

The parent track was an invaluable part of our family’s experience in B’naiture. At an age when young people’s activities often separate them from their families, the B’naiture program sets out a model for a young person’s development that is closely held in family and community. B’naiture found the sweet spot in their capacity to create an experience that both young people and parents can really own on their own terms and have those experiences infuse a shared family culture and set of values.

 The opportunity to share with and hear from other parents passing through this same portal offered a lot of support and insight to my partner and I as we navigated this stage with our two boys. We also felt a sense of partnership with the Wilderness Torah mentors in supporting our boys, which was powerful.

For Wilderness Torah and the Jim Joseph Foundation (one of its supporters), the evolution of B’naiture has been a learning process offering many insights we believe are helpful to both the secular and Jewish education fields. Incorporating parents into their child’s education in meaningful and substantial ways is an effective strategy for all involved.

[1] A New Wave of Evidence: The Impact of School, Family, and Community Connections on Student Achievement A. T. Henderson & K. L. Mapp. (Southwest Educational Development Laboratory, 2002) Report Conclusion.

[2] National Head Start Association http://www.nhsa.org/about-us/mission-vision-history

[3] No Child Left Behind was an initiative introduced by George W. Bush and Race to the Top was introduced by Barack Obama

[4] “Four Ways to Look at the Wicked Child” The Wexner Foundation http://www.wexnerfoundation.org/blog/four-ways-to-look-at-the-wicked-child

[5] Turns out that around 50% of the families engaged chose B’naiture as their primary B’nai Mitzvah experience.

This blog appeared originally in eJewishPhilanthropy. Zelig Golden Is Founding Director of Wilderness Torah, which reawakens and celebrates the earth-based traditions of Judaism, including a focus on life-centered mentorship of youth kindergarten through teen years. Beginning summer of 2016, Wilderness Torah will offer training and consulting in its nature-based curricula and Jewish mentorship model.

The Jim Joseph Foundation is in its tenth year of existence. In a few weeks, we will share an online interactive timeline on the Foundation’s philanthropy, significant grantee outcomes, and lessons learned since its inception. The Foundation website will feature an insightful memoir on our founder thoughtfully crafted by Jim Joseph’s son and Foundation Board member, Josh Joseph. We will also share a microdocumentary on Mr. Joseph, his family history, and his lasting legacy.

As we mark this tenth anniversary, the Foundation continues to be a work in progress. Striving for continuous improvement involves concentrated time and effort among Foundation Directors and professionals. The Board is conducting a search for my successor while also taking steps to plan for transition of its founding Directors. Concurrently, the Foundation has intensified its focus on strategy in its grantmaking, governance practices, and the Foundation’s own financial and staff capacities.

All this activity has created a change management agenda for the Foundation. But the Foundation’s commitment to a founding strategic principle has not wavered: careful consideration of invited grant proposals for significant amounts of funding over four and five year periods.

We are often queried why the Foundation makes such “big bets,” enriching relatively fewer organizations with philanthropic capital when many others might benefit from Foundation grant funding. This question tends especially to surface when the Foundation determines to renew funding to one of its major grantees, often doing so at significant levels of funding support. Two very recent examples of this type of funder/grantee partnership – Hillel International and Moishe house – offer insights regarding how and why the Jim Joseph Foundation chooses to strategically fund well-aligned grantees with large grants and long-term funding.

First, it bears noting that much of the social sector struggles incessantly to achieve organizational stability. Mario Morino posited years ago that:

Non-profit organizations exist in a culture of dysfunction – limited capacity and modest outcomes pervade critical organizational elements such as strategic planning, staffing, training, management, financing and performance measurement. This dysfunction makes success highly improbable and calls into question the sustainability of organizations unable to adequately capitalize future growth (Community Wealth Ventures, Inc., “Venture Philosophy: Landscape and Expectations,” Reston, VA: The Morino Institute, 2000).

In this regard, the Jim Joseph Foundation spends a great deal of time conducting due diligence on potential grantees. For organizations that are mission aligned, potentially scalable with their reach, and critically positioned within the Foundation’s focus on education of Jewish teens, youth, young adults and young families, deep investment is inviting.

Recognizing, for example, that Hillel reaches and engages 400,000 college-age students annually, the Foundation determined early in its existence to explore effective partnership with the organization. We learned quickly that Hillel would require repeated infusions of funding to build capacity in order to most effectively engage as many college students and communities as possible. The Foundation’s grants for the Senior Jewish Educator/Campus Entrepreneur Initiative; evaluation of it; funding for the Heather McLeod Grant and Lindsay Bellows study about Hillel’s effective strategy to leverage social networks for student engagement; resources for business planning; and seed capital for Hillel projects deemed to be of high priority to a new CEO bespeak the Jim Joseph Foundation’s commitment to long-term investment in high performing grantees.

The new $16 million, five year grant the Foundation just awarded to support Hillel in accelerating its ambitious Drive to Excellence campaign affirms this deep commitment.

An organization at an entirely different stage of its development – and one that is distinct in its nature – than Hillel is Moishe House. The Jim Joseph Foundation is a “both/and” funder. This is to say that both new, fledgling organizations and legacy institutions are beneficiaries of Foundation investment. In the case of the former, the Foundation understands keenly that:

Organizations do not emerge full blown and high performing. It takes years of thoughtful design, capacity building, and program implementation for an agency to know its work thoroughly enough, learn from its efforts, understand its strengths and weaknesses, and refine its strategy to the point where it has a robust framework and platform for managing its performance (Hunter, David. Working Hard and Working Well. Hunter Consulting LLC, 2003).

Repeated Jim Joseph Foundation funding of Moishe House, totaling $8,230,000 over nine years, has been awarded with intent to steadily build the organization’s capacity and to help it become more proficient at monitoring its performance and measuring achievement of targeted outcomes. Jen Rosen, Moishe House’s chief operating officer, reflects this interest in commenting that Moishe House “needs to assess the longer term impact on residents and participants. As a relatively new organization, the data we have collected has been helpful, but as we near our 10 year anniversary, it’s time to begin assessing the longer term implications of involvement in Moishe House. During the recent study, roughly 900 respondents agreed to be contacted for follow up within three years in order to begin a longitudinal study” (Rosen, Jen,  August 26, 2015. “How Moishe House Looks Different Post Evaluation,” eJewish Philanthropy).

Numerous Moishe House accomplishments, all well documented, encouraged the Jim Joseph Foundation to extend grant application renewal invitations to Moishe House several times. The Foundation relies on Moishe House to execute smartly on its objectives and goals, thereby helping the Foundation realize its vision of “ever increasing numbers of young Jews engaged in ongoing Jewish living and choosing to live vibrant Jewish lives.”

There are clearly forces at work bringing pressure to bear on not-for-profits for improved efficiency, performance, and results. The steady proliferation of 501c3s—“the number of non-profits in the United States has nearly doubled since 1995, from 518,000 to more than 1 million today” (Stoolmacher, Irwin. 2015, September. “With Money So Tight, We Need to Get Rid of Poor-Performing Charities,” The Chronicle of Philanthropy, page 29.)—leads many to contend the sector is riddled with duplication, redundancy, and inefficiency. Moreover, given that systematic, right-sized evaluation of Jewish education funded programs and projects is still not normative, it is extremely difficult to find credible comparative data for philanthropic decision making.

In this environment, programs that effectively prepare and professionally develop Jewish educators are not readily identifiable. The Foundation candidly could not project with any certainty if its $45 million Education Initiative grants—$15 million each over seven years to HUC-JIR, JTS, and YU—would produce outcomes ultimately worthy of the investment. Yet, the Foundation decided to not only award the grants for credential and degree granting courses and programs, faculty, and instructional technology, but also to avail the institutions of exceptional technical assistance as a means to augment the funding. This contract expertise included the American Institutes for Research (AIR), which is conducting the Education Initiative’s formal evaluation. The Parthenon Group provided upfront analysis and guidance on each institution’s structures for project management and administration. A premier college enrollment firm, Noel Levitz, offered much needed counsel on marketing and recruiting, enrollment trends, and setting of tuition rates. The Foundation’s funding made it possible for the institutions to contract with Columbia Center for New Media Teaching and Learning for a cross-institutional technology fellowship. Now, with four comprehensive formative evaluations completed, findings reveal the following:

• 1,412 educators have received certificates or degrees from one of the three participating institutions.
• The degree and professional development programs under the Education Initiative promoted leadership development through improved management skills and content knowledge.
• The degree programs supported entry into Jewish day school teaching and the professional growth of experienced Jewish day school teachers and school leaders.

AIR will produce a fifth and final evaluation next year. At the Foundation’s upcoming October Board meeting, Foundation Directors will discuss with AIR Vice President Dr. Mark Schneider and the evaluator’s project director, Dr. Yael Kidron, a discrete set of questions to be addressed in this summative evaluation report. The Foundation’s learning over seven years of this initiative will hopefully be captured in the 2016 report and disseminated to the field. Already—as we anticipated—it is clear that improving the quality, breadth, and depth of education training in institutions of higher education necessitates a long-term strategy to achieve results premised on extended, multi-year commitments of funding.

As one last example of more than a dozen of these relatively large, long-term grants, consider the Foundation’s award in its early years to BBYO for BBYO’s Professional Development Initiative (PDI). This grant for continuing nonprofit management and Jewish education was awarded again without much relevant data on similar professional development efforts to inform the Foundation’s grantmaking. Yet BBYO’s mission alignment with the Foundation, its growth trajectory of Jewish teen membership and engagement, its effective organizational management and controls, and an active, diligent Board of Directors governance made PDI an attractive investment opportunity for the Foundation.

Jim Joseph Foundation professionals interacted routinely with BBYO leadership and key PDI personnel over eight years of grant implementation in a project the Foundation generously funded. This shared persistence by BBYO and the Foundation is a recognition that success, or lack of it, in improving education of young Jews is neither a simple nor necessarily short-term proposition.

To that end, Informing Change just completed Briefing papers and evaluation on BBYO’s PDI. The ten lessons Informing Change describes in the report suggest ways the Foundation could have more effectively supported BBYO in its implementation of PDI. The evaluation also points out a few shortcomings in PDI’s program design. Overall, what is noteworthy is that the amount of funding awarded and the duration of time afforded to BBYO in its PDI experimentation allowed the organization to learn. Additional investment of time and money produced an evaluation, as the Briefing papers note, that responds to a human resource talent issue that is fundamental to the field:

Leaders across the Jewish communal sector have a number of strategic questions to consider related to developing talent. These questions range from considering what types of education are most beneficial in which circumstances (e.g., considering a generalist degree or a credential offered through a Jewish institution), to the role of personal learning, to the tension of helping professionals do their jobs better today while also preparing them for the future.

PDI has contributed to these discussions by testing new approaches to professional development. As the program comes to a close, it surfaces the lessons shared in this brief and provides a case study of Jewish community practitioners and employers to look to when building future endeavors. As the discussion of professional development continues in the Jewish communal sector, the considerations and practices that emerged through the PDI experience can hopefully strengthen development opportunities going forward (Advancing Early-Stage Jewish Careers: Lessons from BBYO’s Professional Development Institute, Informing Change, July 2015).

The Jewish high holy days enjoin us to personally reflect and repent, atone and account—to recommit to principled, purposeful lives reflecting time honored Jewish values.  Describing above one important aspect of Jim Joseph Foundation philanthropy is an effort to be professionally reflective and accountable, with the hope that valuable lessons the Jim Joseph Foundation has learned will contribute to your practice.