Findings from first national study on Jewish grandparents show depth of involvement

New data provides an in-depth picture of Jewish grandparenting in an age of complexity and change.

The first-ever national study of Jewish grandparents—commissioned by the Jewish Grandparents Network (JGN), in partnership with 17 national organizations and Jewish Federations—provides detailed information about the demographics, attitudes, beliefs, behaviors and needs of this crucial family sector.

Nearly 8,000 individuals (approximately 1,000 of them from a nationally representative sample) participated in the study.

Key findings include that fact that most grandparents are committed to transmitting of Jewish values; nearly half of the grandparents in the national representative sample have a child married to a non-Jewish partner; and most frequently, interactions between grandparents and their grandchildren take place in their homes and their grandchildren’s homes, around birthdays and national holidays.

According to David Raphael, co-founder and CEO of JGN, “the challenge for the Jewish community is to pivot towards the wonderful opportunity to engage grandparents in ways that ultimately bring the entire family together in meaningful Jewish experiences. Grandparents really can be partners in the Jewish engagement work that so many communities look to do.”

The study identified five segments or groupings of Jewish grandparents, based on shared attitudes and beliefs:

  • Joyful Transmitters (20 percent): love being grandparents, and feel that it’s important to transmit Jewish values and beliefs.
  • Faithful Transmitters (16 percent): want their grandchildren to have a strong connection to Judaism and to marry Jews.
  • Engaged Secularists (23 percent): engaged grandparents, but don’t model Jewish involvement for their grandchildren.
  • Wistful Outsiders (20 percent): want to be more involved with their grandchildren, but family dynamics get in the way.
  • Non-Transmitters (20 percent): not Jewishly engaged nor interested in passing on Jewish practices to their grandchildren.

In the months ahead, the Jewish Grandparents Network will collaborate with educators, professionals, community leaders and academic to further mine the study’s extensive data, as well as understand how it can inform communal and organizational priorities and practices.

A report of the study’s findings will be available soon. For a copy, email: [email protected].

Source: Jewish News Service

Serving as Leaders for the Jewish Teen Education and Engagement Funder Collaborative

As the Jewish Teen Education and Engagement Funder Collaborative continues the work that started in 2013, we are excited about the advances we see in the field. More communities have more resources to offer, in an increasingly diverse, supportive, and genuinely creative field – which leads to more offerings to engage teens in meaningful Jewish life. The Funder Collaborative – made up of ten communities and national and local funders that develop, nurture and scale new approaches to teen engagement – shares insights and lessons learned with the field so that any community, most anywhere, can elevate its teen engagement.

At this moment, both of us can also step back and share our experience of serving on the Funder Collaborative’s Operating Committee (OC) in 2017-2018. We do this because funder collaboratives are inherently complex – with many different organizations and people coming together at a common table, both for, ideally, a common goal, but also with their own goals. Embarking on an effective teen initiative, and creating an effective Funder Collaborative requires leaders. And being positioned for successful leadership is paramount.

We were incredibly fortunate to join the OC during the Funder Collaborative’s second stage, with an executive director in place. As Federation and foundation professionals with full plates of our own, the FC’s incredible executive director, Sara Allen, enabled us to feel excited about the opportunity to serve in this role and made filling the role something doable – even with regular time constraints and competing priorities.

We found serving on the OC and being leaders of the Funder Collaborative to encompass a few main responsibilities and opportunities. Anyone asked to serve in similar roles of similarly complex, multi-faceted endeavors will hopefully resonate with some of these reflections and perhaps find them helpful:

Relish the Role
Simply being a part of a Funder Collaborative made up of communities and funders who steward communal dollars, from across the country is a chance to learn, to grow professionally, and to infuse your organization with new ideas. Being on the Operating Committee of such an endeavor offers even more of these opportunities. Taking part in a field building endeavor to try and move the needle for how teen engagement is carried out in communities across the country is a powerful experience. Moreover, working with researchers to launch major surveys to teens and teen professionals and engaging youth-serving organizations to learn about their work and goals, are opportunities to learn from practitioners and beneficiaries in the field, on a scale that often times is out of reach. The insights emerging from these studies have been exciting and informed new ways of looking at the space.

Serve as a Sounding Board
There’s always an important balance to strike between simply listening to what people are saying and determining what, if any, next steps might follow. We listened to our colleagues in other communities and heard what learnings and best practices on teen engagement were actually helpful to them. We then sought to give voice to the “needs” and “wants” that we heard. In this way, we hope that we facilitated the flow of information, and helped the Funder Collaborative to be most responsive.

The Ombudsman Role
By nature – and by name – a funder collaborative necessitates significant collaboration among various entities: the practitioner organizations that make up the collaborative; the funder organizations and their lay leadership; professional leadership and colleagues, and evaluators, if they are engaged. The FC has all of these. Thus, our leadership role included serving as ombudsmen of sorts. We communicated to the primary national funder, the Jim Joseph Foundation, on behalf of the communities. We communicated with our home communities, who carry the other half of the funding, and directly oversee the initiatives; the research team leading the major cross-community evaluation to help ensure that the CCE would bring value to the communities; we also worked to make sure that what the communities were doing and learning was making its way into the CCE.

Different People Coming Together
For teen engagement, as for other endeavors, what works in New York doesn’t necessarily work in Cincinnati – and vice versa – and so it is for other cities as well. Serving on the OC amplifies this truth and was an opportunity for deeper and wider learning that extends far beyond our own communities – what cities are in fact in need of or best suited for certain programs? Our leadership roles on the FC gave us a great opportunity to go beyond our own bubbles and interact with communities of different sizes and learn the realities of varying resources, audiences, and other differences.

Cultivate and Foster Open Communications
Finally, as is so often true, getting behind a culture of openness, premised on trusting and strong relationships, was key to being effective leaders for the FC, to advance its support of our colleagues, communities’ teen initiatives, and the field. We both sought to bring a spirit of transparency to this role and felt comfortable sharing our own concerns with our colleagues. We hope that our colleagues throughout the FC understood our role as supporters and advocates, open and honest communicators about topics ranging from evaluations, programs, team building, lay leadership engagement and more. We worked closely with Sara to outline a clear agenda, and always checked for agreed upon expectations and goals. Ultimately, we both grew to know our colleagues in deeper ways. And we’re all better off for it.

Now, as the Jewish Teen Education and Engagement Funder Collaborative continues in its 7th year, we are off the OC, but still representing our communities in the FC and most importantly, in the work. The growth of the field focusing on teen Jewish initiatives and the resources now available for any community will continue to elevate this work. Phase 3 of the FC, now underway, is about building on early lessons learned, the successes, challenges and failures. The FC, as a multi-layered entity, with so many committed colleagues, outstanding educators who lead the programs on the ground, and thoughtful funders and organizations to envision and realize the work, help make all of this possible.

Melanie Schneider is Sr. Planning Executive with the Department of Jewish Life at UJA Federation of New York.

Brian Jaffee is Executive Director at The Jewish Foundation of Cincinnati.

Source: eJewishPhilanthropy

Makom 4HQ Moishe House Cohort

Through a year-long learning training program from Makom, Moishe House residents and Moishe House Without Walls (MHWOW) hosts are bringing engaging Israel programing to their peers. Makom’s 4HQ program takes the penultimate line of Hatikvah—To Be | A People | Free | In Our Land—and adapts it to four question areas that address the ongoing creative tension between 1) security, 2) Jewish Peoplehood, 3) democracy, and 4) the Land of Israel. The result is that a topic, Israel, that once was avoided for programming at Moishe Houses, is now discussed, debated, and appreciated in its full complexity.

It feels like this whole approach to digging deeper into Israel programming, and having the hard conversations, could be applied to all our Moishe House programming.
– Member of 4HQ Cohort 1

The 4HQ cohort of residents and hosts engage in webinars, in-person gatherings, 1-on-1 mentoring sessions to dive deeper into what they’re learning, and one weeklong trip through Israel. All of these platforms are vehicles to explore the social, historical, and political landscape of Israel from a multitude of perspectives. The trip to Israel, for example, showcases the beauty of Israel, gives space to grapple with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, offers meetings with Palestinians and Jews living over the green line, enables discussions with ultra-Orthodox Jews, provides experiences in cutting-edge civil discourse initiatives, and more. This reflects Makom’s goal not just to teach Moishe House leaders how to engage others with Israel, but to teach these leaders Israel content as well. In the second cohort, scheduled to begin this summer, Makom will roll out a unique Israel 101 Quiz intended to help participants set learning goals, while learning more about the history and culture of Israel.

As the training progresses, cohort participants gain the knowledge, skills and confidence to create and facilitate meaningful, practical, real-life Moishe House programs about Israel with their peers—for which they receive microgrants from Makom.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lh_bycFHZYE&feature=youtu.be
A spoken-word performance, reflecting on the experience of engaging with Israel

Around the country, Moishe Houses and young adults are finding that Israel programming can inspire deep engagement, excitement, and interest. When approached through the 4HQ framework, young adults of various backgrounds and perspectives come together, respect each other, and dive into Israel. Based on the success of the first 4HQ Moishe House cohort, Moishe House and Makom have begun reviewing more applications for cohort 2. More program and application details are available here.

Take part in “The Makom Parallel Israeli Election” and access resources about the Israeli election at www.makomisrael.org. The parallel election is meant to engage Jews around the world in the Israeli election, encouraging them to learn about the salient issues in Israel today, and ultimately to strengthen the conversation between Jews around the world and Israelis.  

 Makom’s 4HQ training program for Moishe House received one of ten grants in educator training from the Jim Joseph Foundation, following an open RFP.

GenZ Now: Understanding and Connecting With Jewish Teens Today

This study is animated by the vision that all Jewish teens in America will see their Jewish heritage as a source of wisdom, inspiration, and strength as they grow and discover their place in the world. Authored by The Jewish Education Project and Rosov Consulting, GenZ Now, Understanding and Connecting with Jewish Teens Today is the largest study of American Jewish teens ever conducted, with 17,576 teens participating. It deepens our understanding of the complexities of being a Jewish teen in the United States today.

Among the key headlines from the report:

  • Participation in Jewish youth movements, youth groups and other organizations – collectively referred to as youth-serving organizations, or YSOs – measurably contributes to teens connecting to being Jewish, and to feeling good about themselves, their relationships, and their ability to make change in the world.
  • Jewish teens get along with their parents and often reflect their Jewish values and practices.
  • For Jewish teens, being Jewish is often about family, holiday celebrations, and cultural practices.
  • Jewish teens share the troubles and concerns of other American adolescents, notably managing anxiety and depression, and coping with academic pressure.

Perhaps the most important message that communities and organizations can take away from this study is that youth-serving organizations are awesome. Teens who participate in a youth-serving organization (or at least the organizations studied in the report) score higher on almost every outcome measured by our researchers, including affinity toward Israel and behaving with the intention of making world a better place.

The findings of this report suggest an imperative to invest further in youth-serving organizations as a model for teen engagement, both to champion the invaluable work that YSOs are already doing, and to imagine new possibilities, including opportunities that appeal to teens who are underrepresented and not yet engaged.

GenZ Now: Understanding and Connecting With Jewish Teens Today, The Jewish Education Project and Rosov Consulting, March 2019

Access the GenZ Now data files from the Berman Jewish Databank.

Largest Study of Jewish Teens Previewed at Jewish Funders Network

At this week’s Jewish Funders Network Conference, The Jewish Education Project unveiled what we believe to be the largest study of American Jewish teens ever conducted, with 17,576 teens participating. GenZ Now, Understanding and Connecting with Jewish Teens Today deepens our understanding of the complexities of being a Jewish teen in the United States today.

Among the key headlines from the report:

  • Participation in Jewish youth movements, youth groups and other organizations – collectively referred to as youth-serving organizations, or YSOs – measurably contributes to teens connecting to being Jewish, and to feeling good about themselves, their relationships, and their ability to make change in the world.
  • Jewish teens get along with their parents and often reflect their Jewish values and practices.
  • For Jewish teens, being Jewish is often about family, holiday celebrations, and cultural practices.
  • Jewish teens share the troubles and concerns of other American adolescents, notably managing anxiety and depression, and coping with academic pressure.

Perhaps the most important message that communities and organizations can take away from this study is that youth-serving organizations are awesome. Teens who participate in a youth-serving organization (or at least the organizations studied in the report) score higher on almost every outcome measured by our researchers, including affinity toward Israel and behaving with the intention of making world a better place.

The findings of this report suggest an imperative to invest further in youth-serving organizations as a model for teen engagement, both to champion the invaluable work that YSOs are already doing, and to imagine new possibilities, including opportunities that appeal to teens who are underrepresented and not yet engaged.

Beginning with a VIP reception on May 28th in New York City, The Jewish Education Project will explore the findings of this monumental study with funders, lay leaders and leadership of participating YSOs. We hope this report provides youth professionals and other stakeholders with constructive insights that enrich their capacity to work with Jewish teens.

Beyond the considerable amount we have learned about American Jewish teens themselves – their essence, their interests, and the ways in which youth-serving organizations matter in their lives – this project serves as a paradigm for collaboration among funders, researchers, and practitioners.

This study would not have been possible without our partners at Rosov Consulting; lead researchers Arielle Levites, Ph.D., and Liat Sayfan, Ph.D.; or the goodwill of the 14 participating youth-serving organizations – from across American Jewish communal life, representing an extraordinary breadth of ideologies and interests. By mobilizing as a field to advance this research, these partners have set an example by prioritizing the teen experience over specific organizational needs.

Their openness to work together to elevate the field and to enrich teens’ development beyond the walls of their own institutions is truly admirable – and indicates a continued, positive shift in organizational mindset and approaches in Jewish teen engagement efforts today.

On behalf of our partners, The Jewish Education Project offers its sincere gratitude to the Jim Joseph Foundation, Lippman Kanfer Foundation for Living Torah, and the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation for their support in this long-term effort. Their vision and commitment enabled us to complete this complex and robust multi-year, multi-stage study, which we hope will serve as a model for Jewish communal and educational research in the future.

GenZ Now, Understanding and Connecting with Jewish Teens Today will be released digitally in June. Click here to sign up for a copy of the report, which includes findings based on the following Jewish Youth Servings Organizations:

  • BBYO
  • Bnei Akiva of the US and Canada
  • The Bronfman Youth Fellowship
  • CTeen
  • Diller Teen Fellows
  • Friends of Israel Scouts/Tzofim
  • Habonim Dror North America
  • JCC Association of North America
  • Jewish Teen Funders Network
  • Moving Traditions
  • NCSY
  • URJ Youth/NFTY
  • USY/USCJ’s Youth Movement
  • Young Judaea

The Future of Jewish Learning Is Here: How Digital Media Are Reshaping Jewish Education

Among the many ways in which the internet has irreversibly changed our lives is how it has enabled access to information with unprecedented speed and ease. By changing how we engage with information, it has also changed how people relate to information and how they negotiate its various meanings. Social media have accelerated this process by creating new ways to connect people through sharing information. These changes have influenced our communities, our politics, our consumption patterns, how we spend our leisure time, and even our definitions of “friend” and “like.”

Learning online does not look exactly like learning in classrooms or schools, summer camps or seminaries. Nor should we expect it to. And yet, people are learning online, and this report makes the case for understanding online engagements as educational. The question it answers is, “How are people learning online?” Combining leading research about secular online learning and new data about Jewish online learning, The Future of Jewish Learning Is Here offers a substantive, richly illustrative, and intimately informed account of Jewish learning online. It accounts for when, where, and how it happens, what people are learning, and how they are engaging with information alone and in relation with others. Jewish educational online media enable learners to:

Jewish educational online media enable learners to:

  1. Connect with others around Jewish learning
  2. Access Jewish knowledge beyond Jewish institutions
  3. Learn in sync with the rhythms of the Jewish calendar
  4. Utilize different platforms for different ends
  5. Integrate online learning and offline practice

Together, these key findings represent a portrait of Jewish learning online, with the understanding that learning online is more diffuse, less coordinated, more generally self-directed than learning in schools and other formal settings. The Future of Jewish Learning Is Here: How Digital Media Are Reshaping Jewish Education offers insights into how and what people learn online, as part of a larger conversation about what Jewish education looks like in the 21st century.

The Future of Jewish Learning Is Here: How Digital Media Are Reshaping Jewish Education, March 2019
(view as single pages)

Read a series of blogs in eJewishPhilanthropy on insights from the report:

Add comments and feedback on the report here:

New Working Paper Provides Fresh Data About Experiences of Educators in Jewish Settings

A new Working Paper released today by George Washington University Graduate School of Education and Human Development (GSEHD) and CASJE (Consortium for Applied Studies in Jewish Education) is the first report of a multi-year, comprehensive research project addressing the recruitment, retention, and development of educators working in Jewish settings in North America. “On the Journey” shares preliminary insights on individuals who work as Jewish educators today and by comparison with educators who either transitioned to administrative roles or left the field. Stakeholders focused on quality and impact of Jewish education across the country believe that attracting and nurturing talent is one of the greatest challenges today.

The multi-year research project, being conducted by Rosov Consulting, is funded with generous grants from the William Davidson Foundation and Jim Joseph Foundation. The concepts reviewed in the “On the Journey” report lay the foundations for additional analysis of relevant data on experiences of working educators, and for other parts of the study, which will continue over the next 18 months. GSEHD, CASJE, and the researchers welcome comments on the working paper, which can be submitted to Joshua Fleck, [email protected].

“This research lays the groundwork for a project that will provide useful evidence for policy makers, practitioners, funders, and other stakeholders, and inform decisions about how the field can attract and retain greater numbers of qualified educators,” said Bob Sherman, a leading educator and member of the CASJE leadership group. “This is pioneering research in Jewish education, critical for understanding the types of training and support systems needed to sustain and retain personnel.”

In this first phase of inquiry, researchers relied on intensive interviews, literature reviews, and other data to explore what motivates people to commit to working as Jewish educators, how they grow professionally, and in what ways their workplace conditions, lived experiences, and professional journeys shape their professional choices. Ultimately the project will provide new understanding of the working conditions and professional development interventions that make a difference to job satisfaction, self-efficacy, and career commitment. These outcomes are typically associated with educator retention and growth, and in turn learner participation, motivation, and educational outcomes.

The study benefits from independent advice of a group of technical advisers with expertise in Jewish education, statistical methods, and teacher labor markets.

Key insights from this Working Paper include:

  • The need to adopt broadly inclusive definitions of who is a “Jewish educator;”
  • The importance of measuring educator characteristics such as tenure, satisfaction, sense of self-efficacy, and commitment in conjunction with program qualities and workplace;
  • Implications of differences in the effects of workplace culture as reported in case studies of Jewish educators and in the general literature of school professional culture; and
  • The importance of examining whether and how prior experience in youth movements and summer camp prepare people for professional work in both formal and experiential educational settings.

“On the Journey” is available for download here.

Source: “New Working Paper Provides Fresh Data About Experiences of Educators in Jewish Settings,” eJewishPhilanthropy, March 8, 2019

ON THE JOURNEY: Concepts That Support a Study of the Professional Trajectories of Jewish Educators

This working paper released by The George Washington University Graduate School of Education and Human Development (GSEHD) and CASJE (Consortium for Applied Studies in Jewish Education) is the first report of a multi-year, comprehensive research project addressing the recruitment, retention, and development of educators working in Jewish settings in North America. “On the Journey” shares preliminary insights on individuals who work as Jewish educators today and by comparison with educators who either transitioned to administrative roles or left the field. Stakeholders focused on quality and impact of Jewish education across the country believe that attracting and nurturing talent is one of the greatest challenges today.

The multi-year research project, being conducted by Rosov Consulting, is funded with grants from the William Davidson Foundation and Jim Joseph Foundation. The concepts reviewed in the “On the Journey” report lay the foundations for additional analysis of relevant data on experiences of working educators, and for other parts of the study, which will continue over the next 18 months.  GSEHD, CASJE, and the researchers welcome comments on the working paper, which can be submitted to Joshua Fleck, [email protected].

ON THE JOURNEY: Concepts That Support a Study of the Professional Trajectories of Jewish Educators, Rosov Consulting, March 2019

The Pursuit of Innovation Takes Many Forms

There’s no one way to innovate. In Jewish education and engagement, creating change and developing new approaches comes in many forms, often through much trial and error. In the Jim Joseph Foundation’s guest blog this month, we share the innovation approach and journey of one grantee-partner, Sefaria, which offers insights on how finding a solution to one challenge often simply means that more innovating is yet to be done. Another grantee-partner, the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America, frames its entire approach on “the hypothesis that the future of Jewish life, in a climate of personal autonomy and choice, depends entirely on whether Judaism can compete in the marketplace of ideas and identities.” This hypothesis is a call for innovation, reflected throughout SHNA; its David Hartman Fellowship, for example, focuses on “innovation in applied scholarship.” From these and many other partners, the Foundation is learning about the different approaches to innovation, as well as the different ways the Foundation can support this work.

This learning is occurring as the place of innovation has grown in our field. What was once a nascent part of Jewish learning, “innovation” now is an arguably overused term. For it not to lose its meaning, we, as a field, need to constantly examine what innovation looks like today and how organizations and individuals are pursuing it. Three additional organizations—Reboot, Upstart, and Hillel—serve as useful examples for different ways and strategies with which to approach innovation. They operate, respectively, at the “Ideas Level,” the “Implementer Level,” and the “Organizational Level.” Funders and grantees, we believe, both have something to gain by understanding how these different approaches drive innovation in our fields, and how failure and humility are requisite traits as one pursues innovation.

Ideas Level: Reboot “reimagines, reinvents and reinforces Jewish culture and traditions for wandering Jews and the world we live in.” The heartbeat of Reboot is a network of creative and successful artists, makers and thinkers, now over 600 members strong, who are organized around a conversation about Jewish inheritance and action, leading to ideas and products that remix Judaism to inspire and engage new generations of Jews and those close to them.

Reboot’s support system for its network enables individuals to bring modern themes through a Jewish lens into the world. The Foundation invested in Reboot in part because of its R&D focus, which includes increasing the activation of its network as well as the products that Reboot develops, which have touched millions of people and helped evolve the Jewish conversation. Innovation occurs because ideas and concepts can be proposed and experimented with. Reboot is developing an Ideas Festival, for example, to bring together thinkers/makers/artists to discuss new big ideas in the space of Jewish arts and culture, and what methods can be used to share them broadly.

Implementer Level: UpStart “partners with the Jewish community’s boldest leaders to expand the picture of how Jews find meaning and how we come together.” It represents a different approach to innovation, one focused primarily on fueling and connecting the many organizations and leaders driving change in Jewish life. They do this by providing targeted support for changemakers at every stage, whether they’re dreaming up a new idea, building it into a promising initiative, or ultimately growing that initiative’s impact. And they do this across the field of Jewish communal life, supporting entrepreneurs and their ventures, as well as institutional leaders working to drive change from within (“intrapreneurs”). They believe that the true impact of this work is in the coming together of these changemakers to move the needle on the many challenges—and opportunities—facing Jewish life. Convenings like their annual Collaboratory are just one of the many spaces that spur this type of collaboration.

UpStart aims to couple this program suite with more substantial financial resources flowing to the Jewish innovation field—specifically to the organizations and leaders they support. Their goal is to spur strategic and sustainable investments, ensuring that the highest impact initiatives are set up to thrive.

Organizational Level: Hillel International, which connects with students at more than 550 colleges and universities across North America and around the world, “enriches the lives of those students so that they may enrich the Jewish people and the world.” Hillel serves as a perfect final reference point, building on UpStart’s learning that any organization can spur innovation. At nearly 100 years old, Hillel is a quintessential legacy organization—although, uniquely, one that is unafraid of experimenting and of change. To create space for innovation within Hillel, the organization founded an Office of Innovation (OOI) that “is a think and do tank for the Hillel movement and the Jewish people. Modeled after successful research and innovation labs, known affectionately as ‘skunkworks,’ OOI is a group of thinkers, educators, entrepreneurs, and rabbis tasked with developing, testing, and scaling innovative approaches to serve young Jews in the Hillel movement and beyond.”

In other words, the OOI gains all the benefits of Hillel’s resources, networks, and expertise, without being hindered by people’s traditional perceptions of legacy organizations. Creating an entirely separate office helps ensure this work is carried out systemically and strategically. This is not an ad-hoc initiative or one susceptible to starts and stops. Rather, its three-step approach—exploring, incubating, and scaling—resulted in innovations going from the OOI out into the world, including Base Hillel, Fellowship for Rabbinic Entrepreneurs, and more.

A Common Denominator
While Reboot, UpStart, and Hillel, deploy different approaches to supporting innovation, undoubtedly there are similarities. One of which is that all three completed strategic and business planning over the last five years that positioned them to understand the role in innovation support they were best suited to play. They all recognize that to support innovation effectively they need to have dedicated bandwidth, and they need the right people within their own organizations—both lay and professional. The decision to become innovative was not made by a singular individual in any organization; that decision was made collectively through a planning process of lay and professional leaders over many months for each of these organizations.

Finally, each organization along with the Foundation must be humble as it works to innovate. There are and will be failures, and all parties involved know this and accept it. For each success noted above, there are myriad ideas and programs that at one point seemed promising, but in the end were not effective Jewish engagement or could not be scaled. Truly accepting that these failures are a natural part of the innovation process is an integral part of the grantee and funder building a trusting relationship. Whether an organization fits best into the “Ideas,” “Implementer,” or “Organizational,” level, each approach leverages an organization’s resources and expertise to support innovation and to create new opportunities for contemporary, meaningful, and never-before-done Jewish experiences.

Barry Finestone is President and CEO of the Jim Joseph Foundation

Responsive Innovation: Growing and Evolving Through Dialogue

It starts simple. One problem. One need. One idea.

At Sefaria, we take that simple start and grow it collaboratively into robust and sometimes game-changing solutions. This is the heart of our approach to research and development: we listen to our users, we study the potential impact of implementing new tools and features, and then we innovate. We have an ambitious vision to make Torah more accessible and we balance a long list of new product ideas and everyday maintenance needs along with a constant stream of user feedback. This vision is best pursued when our funders view themselves as partners in this journey—ready to celebrate successes and to learn from failures with us—and when they understand why and how this approach yields the innovations that the field embraces.

The Winding Journey to Innovation
As a fast-moving organization, one that is committed to launching early and often, and pivoting when necessary, long-term plans can be tricky. We release a new feature about every three weeks. Some of them you’ve seen, because they’ve gained traction, while others quietly morph into other features, getting redesigned and redeployed later on. Like most tech companies, our product roadmaps primarily exist to help us prioritize the most important work at that moment, and plan the sequence in which we’ll release features as they relate to our strategic goals.

Estimating how long it will take to create an entirely new tool or feature is always a challenge. We do, however, use a quarterly planning process adopted from a technique made famous by Intel and Google measuring objectives and key results–or OKRs. This approach allows us to remain flexible and open to new opportunities while also holding ourselves accountable to internal deadlines and benchmarks. As we grade the previous quarter and plan for the next one, we can adjust to new circumstances, adapt to changes in the broader world of technology, and allow our small but mighty engineering team the opportunity to support the needs of our audience. Furthermore, some of the most successful tools, products and interfaces pioneered by Sefaria – including our Source Sheet Builder – were not initially on any product roadmap.

Source Sheets have long been a fixture in Jewish education. For decades, rabbis, teachers and professors would physically cut and paste these sheets together so that students could learn together in a classroom setting. For a long time, this tool served its purpose.

When Sefaria was first building its library, our team repeatedly heard requests from users: Can I build a source sheet on your site? Given the importance of this pedagogical tool and how inextricably linked it is to the way we study Jewish texts, we knew that our users were onto something. So we listened and responded, building a product that digitized the source sheet.

At first, that’s all it was: just a direct digitization of a once-analog product. Of course even that was a giant leap forward, allowing users to pull from texts without scissors, a glue stick and a copy machine. This new life for the traditional source sheet quickly evolved as we learned from our users.

Soon, we upgraded the ability to add multimedia. A community educator could add video classes to a sheet. Or a teacher could add an image of a Marc Chagall painting to illustrate how a text inspired a piece of art. Or perhaps a singer-songwriter would write music based on female characters in the Bible and upload the recordings with links to the texts that inspired her.

But because Sefaria is an ever-evolving platform, we kept reaching. Again, we turned to our users to listen, learn and grow. We soon realized that we needed a way for educators to reach an eager audience. It wasn’t enough just to host their source sheets–even in their new upgraded form. Now, we needed a method to connect users to the type of content they were seeking.

To this challenge, we responded by developing our Groups feature. Now, organizations and schools, as well as individual artists and thinkers, could launch their curriculum, classes, resources and ideas in a low-risk, high-reward environment. This evolving feature already hosts more than 45 groups including Moishe House, One Table, ELI Talks, various synagogues, schools, Hillels and more.

And it doesn’t end here. As you read this, our team is working around the clock on enhancements for the Groups feature, for the Source Sheet Builder and new tools we have yet to even announce.

Funding the Unknown and Embracing Change Together
For some funders, our approach is unconventional, and the nature of the work can be unsettling. One problem begets one solution—and the work takes off from there. Truly innovating often means embarking on the unknown, including not knowing when—or if—a new project will be completed.

As a software platform that will succeed or fail based on its utility, we are wary of making promises—whether it’s a new feature or an engagement tactic—before anything has been tested by users. If we were to make specific commitments simply to satisfy a funder looking for a detailed project plan and timeline, we could end up building products that are not adaptive and don’t work for the majority of Sefaria’s users.

That’s why we particularly value our relationship with funding partners who learn with us and remain open to flexibility and change throughout the grant period. These partners also understand that risk-taking is a critical part of innovation. And because traditional, “transactional” grant reports sometimes fail to capture progress made and valuable information learned in any period, we appreciate the opportunity for regular check-ins. Our ongoing conversations give us the opportunity to build trust, share honest feedback, learn from each other and, ultimately, better support the Jewish community together.

We’ve been very lucky to work with several major foundations and individual investors who have been willing to take this journey with us. And while we have made a lot of progress making the Jewish library more accessible, we still have a lot of work to do!

Annie Lumerman is Chief Operating Officer of Sefaria.

The iCenter: The Landing Page – An Educator’s Launch Kit

The United States, Russia, and China have all landed spacecrafts on the moon. Soon humanity will add a fourth country to that list: Israel.

On February 21, SpaceIL launched Beresheet, an unmanned spacecraft, onboard an American SpaceX rocket. It will be the first non-governmental spacecraft to land on the moon. As Beresheet launches into orbit, so does a new era of pride and wonder for the Jewish people and the world.

The iCenter—the North American educational partner of SpaceIL—released The Landing Page – An Educator’s Launch Kit to help people engage with this historic moment. The Launch Kit, designed for use by parents and educators, includes STEM activities, Hebrew materials, stories, videos, Moon Party Spotify playlists, and more. Join The iCenter for 30-minute webinars in March to become familiar with the resources and their potential uses. REGISTER HERE.

The story of SpaceIL is one that inspires. Meaningful Israel education is organic, exciting, and resonant. It emphasizes people and their interests. It is also global, setting Israel within a context of universal human narratives. Equally necessary are great stories and events that inspire and invite this generation to see themselves as part of the ongoing life of the land and people of Israel.

This achievement—8 years in the making—taps into our imagination, curiosity, and wonder—and blends STEM with Israel in a monumental way. And it does all of this in the context of an historic quest to reach for the stars.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLtWmF5RofQzMEr2YWpI-io5sFXG-lKiLQ&time_continue=48&v=_ECNZ_hBAHk

Key Funders Invest in the UC Berkeley Institute for Jewish Law and Israel Studies to Establish a Permanent Presence for Students and Community

The Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert Foundation of Los Angeles has awarded the Berkeley Institute for Jewish Law and Israel Studies at UC Berkeley a $1 million matching grant toward the institute’s goal of building a $10 million endowment by 2024.

According to the Jan. 23 announcement of the grant, the Berkeley Institute’s endowment campaign has also received grants totaling nearly $2 million from the Koret Foundation and the Jim Joseph Foundation. 

“We’re issuing a challenge to other funders who care about proven campus models for engaging students around the study of Israel and Jewish identity in the modern world,”  Gilbert Foundation trustee Martin Blank Jr. said in the announcement. “This is an exciting endeavor, and we hope others join us in this cause.” 

The Berkeley Institute houses two programs: the Berkeley Program on Israel Studies and the Berkeley Program on Jewish Law, Thought and Identity. 

The institute, which was launched in 2011 and has a faculty of 22 members hailing from a variety of academic disciplines, allows students to integrate Israel studies throughout different campus departments, courses and programs; and to complement Jewish studies’ traditional focus on history and literature with a range of classes engaging Judaism from different vantage points. 

The Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert Foundation supports a variety of academic programs at UC Berkeley and UCLA, including a monthly colloquium at the Berkeley Institute for presentations and discussions related to Israel and Judaism.

Dawne Bear Novicoff, chief operating officer of the Jim Joseph Foundation, said the Berkeley Institute has transformed the possibilities for Israel study at UC Berkeley.

“The strong desire for rigorous academic engagement with Israel at Berkeley is undisputed now,” Novicoff said. “Each year, the Institute offers even more to students, contributing to an Israel studies landscape that is completely transformed compared to what it was seven years ago. With its proven model, the Institute can work to ensure its future viability and long-term impact.”

Source: Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles