This is the third piece in series in eJewish Philanthropy on the new report from CASJE, conducted by Rosov Consulting, Facing the Future: Mapping the Marketplace of Jewish Education during COVID-19 Read the first piece and second piece in the series on the growing opportunities of full-time work in Jewish education and on what educational offerings parents are prioritizing.

The recent interchange between Andrés Spokoiny and Russel Neiss about what Spokoiny called the “democratization of quality” accelerated by COVID-19 captures two competing visions of Jewish education and the role of the Jewish educator. Spokoiny was celebrating increased access to high quality educational content from anywhere in the world, often free of charge. Neiss saw another instance of misguided seduction by broadcast technology, at the expense of “empower[ing] our teachers and learners with the skills and permission to reinvision, remix and renew our tradition for themselves.”

We don’t intend to take a position in this argument. We want to underline how the perspectives articulated get to the core of one of the more confusing implications of COVID-19 for providers of Jewish education. These perspectives reflect an emerging reality where in many instances, the local and national are no longer well defined, discrete and complementary. They are experienced as competing goods, often within the same organization. This clash between these local and national goods occurs along a spectrum from the benign to the potentially malignant.

We’ve observed this continuum during the course of a major study of the career trajectories of Jewish educators led by CASJE (Consortium for Applied Studies in Jewish Education), supported by the Jim Joseph Foundation and William Davidson Foundation, and conducted by Rosov Consulting.[1] Our reflections here constitute the final installment of insights derived from a recently released interim report, Facing the Future: Mapping the Marketplace of Jewish Education during COVID-19. In this report, based on one strand of the larger CASJE study, we saw the clash between the local and the national as confronted specifically by employers. We outline here how the tension between local and national plays out in a number of sectors of Jewish education, most prominently among youth serving organizations.

The relationship between local and national has been experienced as more confluence than clash among institutions like JCCs and Hillels. Despite having to downsize or furlough their staff in some cases, individual providers with well-developed local identities are, more often than usual, drawing on content and human resources from their larger institutional networks to serve populations essentially trapped at home. The providers maintain their distinct identity while functioning as portals to broader movements.

Things get more complicated in other sectors. For congregational schools, for example, the clash is not so much local versus national, as local versus distant. If their programming now is fully online, many Directors prioritize finding the best people for this moment, wherever they are located. They’re looking for people who can both communicate via this medium and are sensitive to children’s needs at this time. In a previous piece, we noted how this resulted in downsizing staff capacity, letting local people go, and assigning more hours to the strongest educators, sometimes from further afield. These choices prompt concerns about the challenge of rebuilding teams when learners come back into the building. The urgent need now, however, is to do whatever it takes to be relevant and responsive.

For youth serving organizations (YSOs), the choices between local and national are perhaps most difficult. Youth programming depends on finding appropriate and, ideally, able advisors who are geographically proximate to the audience. At the moment, though, geography is no longer a limitation. Some of the largest YSOs, such as BBYO and NCSY, set the bar high when early in the pandemic they created national portals and apps for online resources and programming accessible for individual teens. This has meant that YSOs have been able, first, to ask themselves optimally what they want to accomplish rather than what is possible to accomplish given locally available talent. They then identify the best-qualified people – outside experts if needed – to help achieve their goals – without being limited by location. In fact, they have additional flexibility now because they don’t need to worry about staff-teen ratios in a supervisory sense when programming online. As one director put it, “we don’t have to hire new staff, we can go back to known performers.”

While these circumstances have created a moment of opportunity, some are wrestling with a series of accompanying complications. Local-level youth programming has been hit by the financial challenges of the present moment. Youth professionals were among the first staff to be let go or furloughed by congregations and by other local providers. And, when communities are reopening or seeking to reestablish personal connections among teens and between teens and near peers, there is evidence that some organizations see internships rather than rehires as a more attractive locally-based option when it comes to staffing. There is a danger that a sector that gradually professionalized in recent years will be degraded by financial pressures.

Additionally, one of the greatest strengths of YSOs has always been their ground-game, their ability to form relationships with young people and create opportunities for them to spend time with one another and shape their own experiences. These assets have been badly battered and might be hard to rebuild. At the same time, with so much programming now flowing from central sources, the quality of these offerings is much more consistent and may even be higher. Some of it is said to be exceptional. This, we believe, is the dilemma at the crux of the interchange between Spokoiny and Neiss.

On the one hand, because of their national reach, the YSOs have been able to bring exceptional new content to their participants, and at the same time they are fearful for the future of their prize assets – the local personnel who can form a direct connection with youth. The question is can they somehow hold on to both.

The pandemic has changed the rules of the youth-serving game, and those of other sectors too. These changes do not simply pose questions about staffing and capacity. The dilemmas surfaced are essentially reflective of competing visions of Jewish education. To what extent is Jewish education about the cultivation of relationships, and to what extent is it about initiation into content? The pandemic requires us to confront ultimate questions of this kind.

The multi-year research project is generously funded by the William Davidson Foundation and Jim Joseph Foundation.

Frayda Gonshor Cohen, EdD, is a Senior Project Leader at Rosov Consulting, a mission-driven company that works with funders and grantees to inform and improve Jewish education and engagement.

Alex Pomson is Principal and Managing Director at Rosov Consulting, For more information, visit RosovConsulting.com.

^[1] As part of this study, we conducted interviews and focus groups during July and August of this year with 75 individuals responsible for hiring Jewish educators in a wide span of educational institutions: overnight and day camps, Hillels, day schools, congregations and afterschool programs, JCCs, and early childhood centers.

This is the second piece in series in eJewish Philanthropy on the new report from CASJE, conducted by Rosov Consulting, Facing the Future: Mapping the Marketplace of Jewish Education during COVID-19 Read the first piece in the series here on the growing opportunities of full-time work in Jewish education.

In the United States web searches for the word “essential” spiked between March 22 and March 28, 2020. The reason is not too mysterious. California announced statewide stay-at-home on March 19^th. By March 30th there were similar orders in thirty states. Critical to the lockdown orders was the concept of “essential,” marking which services could continue in person. Across the country people struggled to understand the calculus by which some things closed and others remained opened.

Since the pandemic first disrupted life and work in North America, a steady stream of reports from the field have provided regular updates about “What’s going on in Jewish Education?” and how specific sectors have been coping. A recently released CASJE report, conducted by Rosov Consulting, takes a different tack. It uncovers what is happening in various sectors through the lens of human capital. As part of the “Mapping the Market” strand of CASJE’s Career Trajectories of Jewish Educators Study, this interim report conveys how the labor market in certain sectors of Jewish education has been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic.^[1]

This focus on the labor market reveals a picture that is both familiar and fresh. It makes vivid just how inconsistent the impact of COVID-19 has been on the different sectors of Jewish education and how diverse the patterns of response have been to widely shared challenges. Still despite the diversity of the educational programs in the study, several themes emerged in looking at how COVID-19 affected Jewish education across sectors.

Special Status of Essential Programs
One key observation is the special status afforded to Jewish educational programs deemed essential and even the novelty of the very concept of essential as a framework for categorizing programs. Those sectors that provide services that people cannot do without, in particular childcare and day school education, seem to be emerging from the present moment in better shape than others. They have responded to the moment vigorously, although exactly what business models will prove sustainable for the early childhood sector is uncertain.

These two essential programs, early childhood and day school, are core providers of education (both general and Jewish) and of care for children. Without these programs, parents’ capacity to function day-to-day would be seriously impaired; children’s fundamental well-being and ongoing development would be compromised. Programs that continue to provide these basic functions through these challenging months have earned deep appreciation and gratitude; “big love,” as one interviewee put it. Stakeholder trust in and commitment to these programs may have grown as well.

Luxuries, Leisure Activities, and Nice-to-Haves
Other programs have been viewed differently. They may be perceived as luxuries, leisure activities, or nice-to-haves that enrich and enhance but can be relinquished in the near term. Some are perceived as peripheral obligations or burdens that can be discarded in stressful times – activities which may or may not be picked up again when some semblance of normalcy resumes. Those sectors whose services (in aggregate) are not perceived to reach the threshold of essential – congregational schools and local-level youth work stand out in this respect – have been severely challenged and have seen significant cuts in staff. As an example, parents who ensured their children’s attendance at in-person supplementary school may decide for now to opt-out of yet another virtual schooling program. Something similar was the case over the summer, when parents didn’t push their children to spend yet more hours on-screen to participate in “virtual camp.” Neither supplementary school nor camp were deemed essential by many.

In determining what programs are essential, one might also ask: essential to whom? As a Washington Post article offered, what is essential can be culturally determined. In Belgium, during the thick of lockdown, frites stands remained open; in France, wine stores. In Philadelphia (where Arielle lives) daycares closed and bike stores remained open in the spring; in the fall, public schools never opened but casinos did. In Israel (where Alex lives), there was consternation that falafel stands did not make the cut. This concept of essential, which took on new meaning and urgency in the pandemic, not only dictated what we could or could not do but also revealed who we were and what we prioritized.

Indeed, the word essential means not only that which is important. The word essential can also mean the innermost, elemental nature of a person or phenomenon. That which is deep-rooted, distinctive and fundamental; what lies at our core.

Audiences Determine Their Fundamental Needs
As diverse audiences for Jewish education weigh what is essential in their own lives, they also signal their sentiments about the field’s offerings through a new metric: those programs that respond to their most fundamental needs and those which are, frankly, optional. They distill programs down to what they see as the core components and central rationales and ask how necessary these programs are to them, their families and to their communities. We may not agree with all their calculations or think they are fair, but they certainly have a logic.

In a nation where leisure time for full-time employed professionals is decreasing and with younger American generations having less disposable income than previous ones, the optional may be more and more difficult to justify. Those sectors most threatened by the new calculus may need to reexamine their central rationales and better articulate their essence – and why they too are essential.

The multi-year research project is generously funded by the William Davidson Foundation and Jim Joseph Foundation.

Arielle Levites is Managing Director of CASJE (Consortium for Applied Studies in Jewish Education) housed at George Washington University. You can read more about CASJE’s work at www.casje.org.

Alex Pomson is Principal and Managing Director at Rosov Consulting, a mission-driven company that works with funders and grantees to inform and improve Jewish education and engagement. For more information, visit RosovConsulting.com.

For the first time, those invested in engaging teens have free access to a set of tools that can help track progress of any teen engagement effort, demonstrate accountability to funders and stakeholders, and inform important policy and resource allocation decisions – actions that are even more critical as a result of recent events.

Released by the Jewish Teen Education and Engagement Funder Collaborative, Measuring Impact: Surveys & Data Guidelines for Any Teen Education & Engagement Effort will help further elevate the field and enhance the work of those who care about meaningful Jewish engagement for young people.

Created in partnership with Rosov Consulting, a research firm that works with funders and grantees to inform and improve Jewish education and engagement, three surveys have been refined by the 10 participating communities of the Funder Collaborative. Moreover, recognizing that many organizations do not employ a data analyst, the Funder Collaborative will also make consulting hours available from Rosov Consulting for a limited number of organizations so they can customize the surveys and receive high level guidance on ways to understand and analyze the responses (interested organizations can email [email protected]). The surveys are:

• Teen Survey: the first validated and reliable way to measure the impact of Jewish experiences, the tool includes demographic information so programs can understand who they are reaching, and the Teen Learning and Engagement Scales (TJLES), survey questions which formed the basis of a major national research project, the GenZ Now: Understanding and Connecting with Jewish Teens Today.
• Parent Survey: the tool probes the attitudes and behaviors of parents of teens to garner a deeper understanding of their perspectives, knowledge, and behaviors regarding teen involvement in Jewish life.
• Youth Professionals Survey: educators assess their preparedness to do their work; the tool measures their sense of whether they feel equipped with the appropriate skills, knowledge and core competencies, as well as how valued and satisfied they feel in their roles.

“The data collected through these surveys can paint a rich picture for each organization about the whole teen education and engagement ecosystem: teens’ aspirations and motivations, parents’ desires and values, and youth professionals’ sense of their own ability to fulfill their roles,” said Sara Allen, Executive Director of the Funder Collaborative. “Although different programs take different pathways to meaningful Jewish engagement, making these publicly available equips the field with a common language and a powerful way to gather important information.

“Resources may be stretched thin, but that is precisely when good data becomes even more important – it is vital to smart decision-making,” adds Wendy Rosov, Founder of Rosov Consulting. “To make the surveys even more relevant, in response to these challenging times we incorporated new questions around wellness and mental health. We look forward to working with organizations and programs to customize the surveys to get at the heart of their own learning questions.”

The measurement tools will help organizations benchmark their goals to support their decision-making and strategy, determine and prioritize where to put resources, and help uncover what changes, if any, they might need to make in their approach. The data also can inform and essentially help advocate for increased funding or resources. Three youth-serving organizations have already fielded the surveys and have found tremendous value in using a common set of instruments.

“The professionals engaged in this work are such a key factor in creating and delivering Jewish experiences that resonate with teens,” said Wayne Green, Executive Director of the Jewish Teen Funders Network, which is using the youth professionals survey. “By fielding the Funder Collaborative’s youth professionals’ survey, we’re now able to accurately understand our youth professionals and offer them professional development programs, training, and tools to meet their needs and elevate their work. We are now looking forward to fielding the parent survey in the coming months.”

“We typically survey our teen members every few years, as well as our graduating seniors on an annual basis, to measure not only how many teens we’re reaching but the impact BBYO has on their Jewish learning and growth and how this can inform our future strategy and metrics,” said Karen Alpert, Vice President of IT Strategy and Measurement. “In 2017, we began using the TJLES as the foundational element to measure impact. With just four years of data, we have been able to track our progress more effectively, understand what programs have the most impact on teens, and prove that the more involved a teen becomes in BBYO, they more they grow Jewishly.”

The detailed guidebook, released along with the surveys, provides practical advice to empower any professional to field and analyze the surveys themselves. It includes sections on “How to Collect Data,” “How to Understand Data,” and “How to Share Data,” all with easy-to-implement but important tips and best practices.  It also provides guidance on incentivizing survey response rates, and consent and data privacy.

For more information and to access the surveys and guidebook, please be in touch with Sara Allen, Executive Director of the Funder Collaborative at [email protected].

From June 18 – 20, 2020 in Los Angeles, the Jewish Emergent Network will gather with thought leaders from around North America for (RE)VISION20/20, a dynamic, content-rich, Shabbat-based conference held at IKAR and co-hosted by the Jewish Emergent Network organizations: IKAR in L.A., Kavana in Seattle, The Kitchen in San Francisco, Mishkan in Chicago, Sixth & I in Washington, D.C., and Lab/Shul and Romemu in New York. The conference is co-chaired by Rabbi Noa Kushner of The Kitchen and Rabbi Shira Stutman of Sixth & I.

“People can come choose-their-own adventure as we dig deep into ritual and prayer, a diverse spectrum of music, approaches to creating radically welcoming spaces and programs, and strategies for navigating moral leadership,” says Melissa Balaban, Chair of the Network and CEO of IKAR. “We also invite people into our processes: our best practices, yes, but also how we fail forward and iterate.”

The three days of content will feature laboratories, galleries, interactive experiments, panels, guest speakers and other creative learning modules, with time built in for networking, davening, singing and creating community. Registration is open to the public: rabbis, cantors, Jewish professionals, educators, lay leaders, academics, philanthropists, activists and interested-folks-at-large from across the spectrum of practice are invited to register at www.JewishEmergentNetwork.org. Spots are limited!

(RE)VISION20/20 will also be the capstone of the Network’s hallmark rabbinic fellowship, as the Network designs a leadership development program for rabbinical students, set to launch in 2021. The rabbinic fellowship helped shape 14 members of the next generation of entrepreneurial, risk-taking, change-making rabbis, and among the myriad opportunities at the conference will be the chance to learn with both cohorts of the Network’s fellows.

The communities in the Network do not represent any one denomination or set of religious practices. What they share is a devotion to revitalizing the field of Jewish engagement, a commitment to approaches both traditionally rooted and creative, and a demonstrated success in attracting unaffiliated and disengaged Jews to a rich and meaningful Jewish practice. While each community is different in form and organizational structure, all have taken an entrepreneurial approach to this shared vision, operating outside of conventional institutional models, rethinking basic assumptions about ritual and spiritual practice, membership models, staff structures, the religious/cultural divide and physical space.

Funding for the Jewish Emergent Network and its rabbinic fellowship program has been generously provided through a grant from the Jim Joseph Foundation. Significant additional funding is provided by the Crown Family, the Charles H. Revson Foundation, Diane & Guilford Glazer Philanthropies, the William Davidson Foundation, the Righteous Persons Foundation, the Lippman Kanfer Foundation for Living Torah, and Natan. The Network is working with current funders and cultivating prospective funders in connection with its next major project.

Source: eJewish Philanthropy

If it’s true that money talks, the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America is about to get an earful.

In a joint announcement this month, the Koret Foundation and the Jim Joseph Foundation, both based in San Francisco, said they will give $10 million each to the institute over the next five years.

The $20 million total is one of the largest financial gifts in the history of the Shalom Hartman Institute, a center of Jewish thought and education with a mission to “strengthen Jewish peoplehood, identity and pluralism,” according to its website.

A headline on InsidePhilanthropy.com called it a “record gift” that will “help navigate an unprecedented crossroads of Jewish history.”

The funding, mostly for general operations, will accelerate North American expansion of the Jerusalem-based institute, which now has offices in New York City, San Francisco, Boston, Toronto, Los Angeles, Detroit and Washington, D.C.

It will also be used to hire new scholars, open offices in additional cities, host more events, beef up the Institute’s digital presence, establish more research groups and expand training.

The $20 million will “allow us to build up across the country and put the right tools in front of the right leaders to fight the right challenges, and do it in a serious, sustainable way,” said Dan Friedman, Hartman’s North American director of content and communications.

“Koret does not make a lot of $10 million grants,” said Jeff Farber, CEO of the Koret Foundation, which has been funding a Hartman pilot program in the Bay Area since 2013. “This is basically a $20 million business plan to expand what has been successful in the Bay Area.”

Since 2013, that pilot program has engaged in a variety of events, such as bringing in Shalom Hartman scholars to give public lectures and to meet with Jewish community leaders to help them further ground their organizations in Jewish values. The list of scholars has included Rabbi Donniel Hartman (Shalom Hartman president) and Yehuda Kurtzer (North American president).

“The teachings are insightful and relevant, but grounded in Torah,” said Ollie Benn, San Francisco Hillel executive director, who has attended many Hartman Institute gatherings. “They manage to identify contemporary issues that impact the community and the Jewish world, based on texts that illuminate these issues. [The meetings] create a space with some of the sharpest minds in Jewish thinking to reframe and grapple with complex issues in new ways.”

Barry Finestone, president and CEO of the Jim Joseph Foundation, said his organization has funded numerous Hartman initiatives over the years, such as its iEngage Fellowship for Student Leaders, which helps college students address issues surrounding Israel. This donation marks the foundation’s first large-scale general operating grant to the organization.

“We were already familiar with their work and the quality of it,” Finestone said. “It became clear to us that a number of other grantee partners we work with were using [Hartman] services for their own learning and education. Also, we have as one of our major strategic priorities supporting exceptional Jewish leaders and educators — and we view this [$10 million] grant as a signature grant in this arena.”

Finestone said SHI is more than a think tank. He calls it a “think-and-do tank.”

Rabbi Joshua Ladon, West Coast director of education, said the grants will allow him to “move toward a vision of San Francisco being the hub city” for Hartman’s work in North America. Part of the plan is to build what he called “cohorts of learners and leaders.”

This fits with the Hartman model of having deeply intellectual collective conversations about issues of concern to Jews today, something Ladon says is part of the organization’s DNA.

“We’re grabbing a group of Bay Area senior educators,” Ladon said. “We already have groups of rabbis meeting on a regular basis, groups of executive directors [of Jewish nonprofits] meeting, trying to increase cross-communal congregating at all levels of Jewish life, both to strengthen those organizations and also help build a group of Jewish thought leaders.”

Finestone eagerly sings the praises of the institute, largely because he has participated in sessions facilitated by its scholars.

“While they are deeply pluralistic, their ability to bring diverse Jewish thinkers and teachers together to talk about critical issues sets them apart,” he said. “Some of the pillars that govern North American Jewish life today are products of brilliant ideas that were generated through deep discussion and intellectual curiosity.”

While the $20 million will open up plenty of new options for Shalom Hartman’s presence in North America, Friedman said some things about the approach to scholarship will not change.

“We are able to elevate and deepen the conversations to go both broader and deeper, and take people into a place where they can bring an understanding of their local communities into sharper effect,” he said.

“Here are the tools: thousands of years of ethical and experiential teaching from men and women of wisdom. We bring these old and current texts, and they will give you the tools to deal with the community in the best possible way.”

Source: “Shalom Hartman Institute gifted $20 million by S.F. foundations,” Dan Pine, J – The Jewish News of Northern California, August 21, 2019