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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s a win for the Bay Area as well.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Source: J – The Jewish News of Northern California 

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

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

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

What is WellAdvised?

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

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

Walking the Walk

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

Every Pilot is an Opportunity for Learning

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

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

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

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

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

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

source: eJewishPhilanthropy

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

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

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

End of lesson.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

source: Times of Israel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Source: Atlanta Jewish Times

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

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

Consultants Need to Consult on More than Just Tech

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

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

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

Learn Directly from Audiences

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

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

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

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

Your End User May Be Someone Else

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

Allow the Site to Grow and Change

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

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

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

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

Source: eJewishPhilanthropy

Students at a Little Neck school have begun to embark on a unique scholastic journey with some state-of-the-art equipment at their side.

Yeshiva Har Torah‘s sixth-graders have the distinct opportunity to take charge of their own education with a new “independent study program,” which allows students to choose a specific topic that interests them. The sixth-graders will then begin rounds of project proposals, research, peer-collaboration, prototyping and building.

An interdisciplinary team of educators from backgrounds including science, technology, English and social studies will guide students, allowing them to take on projects spanning a scope of topics.

Student research and collaboration will also be enhanced with cutting-edge technology, including a 3-D printer and accompanying software.

The program and tech additions were made possible with a $5,000 grant from the Tech for Learning Initiative, a program of The Jewish Education Project supported by the Jim Joseph Foundation. The grant covers the cost of the printer, design materials, training and professional development.

Adina Bachrach, a science teacher, said the program will serve as a continuation to a fifth-grade “immersive design thinking” program offered last year.

“Sixth-graders will come into the program already well-versed in the methods and processes of design thinking to solve open-ended problems,”she said. “This new program will allow them to use that knowledge on something tangible about which they’re passionate.”

Already beginning to discuss topics, sixth-grade students have expressed an interest in meteorology, Lego Robotics, pottery and sports broadcasting.

Students at the school are offered hands-on STEAM learning beginning in kindergarten, where they are introduced to robotics. Bachrach, Alissa Ossip and Susan Rose, the educators leading the inaugural independent study program, hope to eventually turn the pilot into a school-wide project.

“I am so proud of our team and see this an important step in the constant development of STEAM opportunities for our students,” school principal Rabbi Gary Menchel said.

Yeshiva Har Torah, located at 250-10 Grand Central Pkwy., was founded in 1989 and serves nearly 700 girls and boys today. Learn more on their website.

Source: “Little Neck school gets funding to buy 3-D printer and enhance STEAM program,” Suzanne Monteverdi, QNS, November 16, 2017