In 2011, social-sector thought leader Mario Morino released a book entitled Leap of Reason. In essence, Morino argued that the social-sector could be vastly improved by relentlessly measuring results for which organizations held themselves accountable to achieve. Morino subsequently created a community of stakeholders committed to this perspective and a website as a portal for conversation about Leap of Reason’s thesis and main ideas.

In the years that followed, Leap of Reason expanded from being a title of a book to the name of an ambitious initiative. Last month, this ambition was on full display as Leap of Reason’s e-newsletter asked a simple yet profound question: “Are you High Performance”? Of course, who doesn’t want to answer a resounding “Yes!”

But nonprofits organizations, including the Jim Joseph Foundation, cannot answer “yes” honestly without first determining the definition of “high performance.” More challenging is having proper tools in place for measuring any set of targeted outcomes. Perhaps even more daunting still is charting a course–and following through with pragmatic implementation–that leads a nonprofit to reach the level of “high performance.”

Leap of Reason has set out to arm organizations with information to address the key questions above. After a year of work and collaboration by its Ambassadors Community, Leap of Reason unveiled The Performance Imperative: A framework for social-sector excellence (PI) to provide clear, actionable answers. The PI is designed to help organizations not only answer the questions from a place of empirical knowledge, but to have that answer be “yes, we are high performance.”

The PI offers both a bird’s-eye view of strategic considerations—its seven pillars—accompanied with detailed operational considerations covering a range of areas, from management style and culture, to organizational financial stability, to programmatic design.

In full disclosure, I am a member in Leap of Reason Ambassadors Community. But regular readers of this blog or those who follow the Jim Joseph Foundation’s work closely know that principles encompassed in the PI have significantly informed the Foundation’s work since its inception in 2006.

Holding ourselves accountable—along with the Foundation’s grantees—is one way we believe helps to address the high performance question. Undoubtedly, thorough information gathering, concrete measurement of outcomes, and a critical analysis of data are core to the Foundation’s approach to philanthropy.

The Foundation’s understanding of best measurements and metrics to determine our level of performance and that of grantees is still evolving. I would argue that this is true for our field as a whole, given the field’s complexities and plethora of views on what constitutes successful Jewish education outcomes and experiences.

That said, we strive to set high standards and to hold ourselves and grantees accountable to those standards. Grantees attest that the Foundation not only wants to see those standards reached, but also wants to ensure that the standards identified align appropriately with the Foundation’s mission and vision. Those elements together constitute an often complex process of measurement and evaluation. But through past trials and errors and continued learning, we work closely with grantees to hold all parties accountable and to determine, as best as we can, whether standards are being met.

As one example, various grants to the Foundation for Jewish Camp (FJC) can be deemed successful based on the increase in campers; the diversity of Jewish backgrounds represented in those families; and the outcomes regarding Jewish learning and connections those campers exhibit. FJC recognizes that it must undergo this scrutiny to help determine whether its strategies are working and are worthy of continuation, or warrant a change in direction.

Secondly, the Education Initiative—comprised of the major grants to Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion (HUC-JIR), the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS) and Yeshiva University (YU)—has undergone a rigorous evaluation process each of the past three years examining a range of important areas. Obviously, reaching a benchmark of numbers of graduates is not enough to deem this grant successful. The Foundation and these institutions expect deep, long-lasting outcomes as a result of this investment, with the capacity of HUC-JIR, JTS, and YU graduate programs substantially enhanced.

As a third example, for the various Foundation grantees focused on teacher training and induction, we can point to evaluations that show increases in tenure at day schools for teachers who have participated in DeLet, the Jewish New Teacher Project, and programs offered through the Pardes Institute, among other grantees in this space.

Do these examples mean the Foundation and these particular grantees are high performance? Possibly not. But they are integral pieces of a puzzle that helps to answer the question, “is the Foundation effectively selecting grantees that perform successfully?”

I believe that the field of Jewish education has much to gain by vigorously and transparently pursuing high performance.

The PI explains:

“The journey toward high performance leads to more meaningful, measurable change – whether its lifting families out of homelessness, closing global health inequities, preserving land, inspiring artistic expression, raising educational achievement, or any of the myriad missions that give purpose to the worlds social-sector organizations…In this era of scarcity and seismic change, high performance matter more than ever. The social and public sectors are increasingly steering resources towards efforts that are based on a sound analysis of the problem, grounded assumptions about how an organization’s activities can lead to the desired change, and leadership that embraces continuous improvement. This is the formula at the core of the PI.” (page 3)

I encourage you to learn more about the PI by watching this brief video. While broad in scope, the PI’s focus on the single and critical question of “high performance” makes it a practical framework. It is a valuable resource for organizations of varying sizes, structures, and missions. And it may be a catalyst for important conversations about how our field can achieve more significant outcomes in more efficient ways.

This week, more than 3,000 Jewish teens from around the country and across the globe will join together in Atlanta for three days of service, learning and celebration as part of BBYO and NFTY’s International Conventions. They will come from cities near and far, towns big and small, each on a leadership journey, all inspired to contribute to the future of the Jewish people.

We can think of no better moment to focus our communal attention on the vital importance of Jewish teen engagement and education.

That is why our foundations are simultaneously bringing together 250 Jewish philanthropists, foundation professionals and communal leaders for the first-ever Summit on Jewish Teens. Concurrently, the leaders of the major youth movements will run a Coalition of Jewish Teens Summit to set shared goals and present a coordinated plan for engaging and educating as many teens as possible about Jewish life and leadership.

These summits come at a time when we more fully understand the positive, long-term impact of engaging teens. Indeed, the good news is that study after study proves that when young people are involved in meaningful Jewish experiences during their teenage years, they are much more likely to be active, lifelong members of the Jewish community. They participate in Jewish life, take on Jewish professional and lay leadership roles, and build a strong connection with Israel and the global Jewish people. What’s more, they often directly credit the organizations and programs they participated in as teens for shaping their Jewish journeys throughout adulthood.

Participants at 2014 BBYO International Convention (IC); photo courtesy.

And yet, the bad news is that as far as we have come, we still have a long way to go before we fully address the disturbing fact that in most communities, an estimated 80 percent of Jewish teens drop out of Jewish life after their b’nai mitzvah.

As funders and community leaders, it is our responsibility to ensure that the post-bar/bat mitzvah years become an on ramp to, rather than exit route from, active Jewish life and leadership.

It will take continued hard work, significant additional investment and sustained commitment if we are going to realize the full potential for Jewish engagement and education during the teen years. We are sharing here a few of the lessons we have learned that we hope will encourage and guide increased investment in the teen space.

The most successful programs put teens in the driver’s seat.

Teens today are an empowered generation. They know what they want, how to find it and how to build it. That’s why teens are most attracted to opportunities that allow them to take ownership for creating experiences, rather than simply consuming one-size-fits-all programs.

BBYO, for example, has seen tremendous success basing its entire model around allowing teens to shape peer-led experiences – a philosophy that has helped them grow from engaging 12,000 to nearly 50,000 teens annually over the past decade. What they and others have found is that ownership inspires leadership and continued excitement to be part of a community that values members not just as consumers but as creators.

Likewise, Jewish teen philanthropy programs are attracting more and more participants by putting teens front and center, empowering them to make strategic philanthropic decisions that have direct impact on their local communities.

Talented Jewish youth professionals make a difference.

The North Shore Teen Initiative (NSTI), a pilot project supported by the Jim Joseph Foundation, provides another successful model, due in large part to the staff. NSTI invests in talented staff who, in turn, make a point of empowering teens to be involved in everything from event planning to recruiting friends to program implementation. Indeed, according to a 2013 study, “Effective Strategies for Educating and Engaging Jewish Teens,” it is that combination of empowerment and support from talented educators that best yields attractive and meaningful experiences.

Other organizations including BBYO, iCenter, Union for Reform Judaism, Foundation for Jewish Camp, Moving Traditions and Jewish Student Connection also understand the importance of investing in training and support to help develop professionals who serve as close mentors, role models and guides to our teens.

Service and Israel play crucial roles in teen experiences.

Service opportunities can be one of the most effective ways to engage teens in Jewish life. Teens are eager to join a community of like-minded peers and make a difference in the lives of others, as evidenced by Repair the World’s J-Serve, the American Jewish Society for Service, summer and gap year service programs and the overall increase in these opportunities and recurring findings from research about the millennial generation.

Likewise, opportunities to connect with Israel are effective catalysts for Jewish engagement. Teen Israel trips play a vital role in helping young Jews forge connections with their peers, with Israelis and with our beautiful and diverse homeland. Studies also show that the impact of an Israel trip actually grows over time, inspiring increased and ongoing involvement in Jewish life and with Israel.

Collaboration is key and leads to creative, new teen engagement opportunities.

It is fitting that the theme of BBYO’s International Convention this year is “Stronger Together.” As funders and communal leaders, we too are stronger together. As we push forward and take action to support and inspire teens, we should remember that no one foundation or organization can tackle this critical issue alone. Many of us are part of a Funder Collaborative that is focusing on how we can create local and national partnerships to help engage more teens in select communities across the country. Already we are seeing that through forming strategic partnerships, scaling innovative initiatives and strengthening the pipeline of continued engagement, we each have unique and vital roles to play.

Now is the moment for us to embrace those roles as part of a broader ecosystem with shared goals and outcomes. We have models of engagement that are working. We have teens who are hungry for opportunities to tap into something larger than themselves, to live as engaged global citizens and to find new ways to connect with Israel and to repair the world. We have studies that show the quantifiable impact of this work and its direct effect on the strength and vibrancy of the Jewish future.

But we need the communal commitment. There are many who are already doing important work in this space. We hope even more will join us, starting this week at the Summit in Atlanta.

Together we can scale successful models and seed new ones so they can reach and engage growing numbers of teens. With this strategy, a generation from now, the 80 percent figure may reflect the number of teens engaged with, rather than disengaged from, Jewish life. And we can inspire teens to have a love of Jewish life and learning, to actively work to strengthen our peoples’ future, and to draw on Jewish values as they create change in the broader world.

Source: “Investing in Jewish Teens: “A Golden Opportunity for Action,” eJewishPhilanthropy, February 9, 2015

In the dead of winter, with a Nor’easter bearing down, what compels someone to travel from Miami to Boston? If you work in Jewish education, it’s the opportunity to see first-hand and learn about all of the elements of a successful project called B’Yadenu. I had the opportunity as well to sit-in on this dissemination, known as the Community Partner Workshop. Important takeaways from this process can help other foundations, schools, and organizations as they decide when and how to disseminate a successful model.

As a demonstration project, B’Yadenu aims to create an effective, sustainable, and adaptable model to provide a Jewish Day School education to more students with a range of special learning needs in the Boston Jewish Day School community. The project is managed by Combined Jewish Philanthropies of Greater Boston in partnership with Gateways: Access to Jewish Education, based in Newton, MA, and Yeshiva University’s Institute for University-School Partnership in New York. Now in its 3rd year, and with two cohorts of five Boston-area Jewish Days Schools, we are beginning to see positive results. Each participating school has developed a Leadership team consisting of administrators and teacher leaders who plan a professional development program for their school as they create and implement a whole school approach to meet the needs of diverse learners.

For the Jim Joseph Foundation, seeing these initial positive results presents a major opportunity in line with our approach to strategic grantmaking and to model documentation and dissemination. This opportunity is why, for two days last month, community and school representatives from Miami and Detroit flew to Boston to learn about the B’yadenu model and the concepts supporting implementation, the project toolkit, and initial outcomes directly from those leading the project.

The Foundation works with grantees to disseminate models in a variety of ways, from websites to hard copy reports. Different models lend themselves to different forms of dissemination. And, the in-person dissemination of B’Yadenu certainly has its benefits:

• A Substantive Model: When the “host” community – in this case Boston – invites other communities to fly in and learn first-hand about an initiative, there is an implicit message that “we have something working here, and we want to help you adapt it for your community.” When different communities take the time and resources to come together in this manner, all parties involved make a commitment to learn and to take the steps necessary to make successful adaption more likely.
• In-person engagement: Even with all of the technology in our world today, the opportunity to interact in-person for two days allows for deep learning. The Miami and Detroit representatives engaged in exercises, asked pointed questions, and had the opportunity to reflect with the Boston representatives on what this might look like in their communities.
• Seeing is Believing: As part of the two-day dissemination, the Miami and Detroit representatives toured schools where B’Yadenu has led to change. They were able to see what the project actually looks like in implementation. By seeing something working, the planning process – while perhaps still daunting – feels incredibly worthwhile. Julie Lambert, Director of Professional Learning Initiatives at CAJE Miami, attended the Workshop and commented, “It was exciting to learn about the B’Yadenu model. We saw how well the project connects to our work in Miami, and how it can be adapted to further develop what we have accomplished in our day school community. We left Boston with renewed energy and increased knowledge to build our capacity for serving our diverse student population.”
• Looking Inwards: While the Workshop was designed to benefit the Miami and Detroit communities, the preparation that the Boston B’Yadenu team went through to lead an insightful and productive two-day workshop was helpful to them as well. The process forced the team – in a good way – to think deeply about the B’Yadenu design and implementation process, what has worked well, what it would change, and how the outcomes are beginning to take root.

“As a demonstration project, B’Yadenu has benefitted from an exceptional interchange of learning between all of our partners (both schools and regional/national agencies),” said Alan Oliff, Director of Jewish Learning and Engagement at CJP and the Project Manager for B’Yadenu. “The dissemination workshop expanded our learning through the questions, ideas, and concerns raised by the Miami and Detroit participants. We appreciated the opportunity to share all that we learned and create new networks that can add to the knowledgebase in the field about best practice going forward.”

Sharing the B’Yadenu model at this relatively early juncture in its development provided a substantial learning opportunity for Boston and the communities considering adapting it. The B’Yadenu team will continue to support Miami and Detroit educators as they determine how to adapt B’Yadenu to their communities.

Other Foundation grantees also are currently involved in model documentation and dissemination. As one example, the Jewish Community Federation of San Francisco, the Peninsula, and Marin and Sonoma Counties Early Childhood Education Initiative, is about to embark on model documentation of its successful Jewish Resource Specialist program. This four-year-old initiative is expanding the capacity of 15 Jewish pre-schools to enhance the Jewish learning taking place, as well as to engage families more deeply in Jewish family experiences.

The recent Grantee Perception Report on the Jim Joseph Foundation indicated clear field interest in the Foundation continuing to broadly share efforts of its grantees. We hope that the building, documentation, and dissemination of successful models is an effective response to this expressed interest of stakeholders in Jewish education.

Sandy Edwards is Associate Director of the Jim Joseph Foundation.

Source: “More than One Way to Document a Model,” Sandy Edwards, eJewishPhilanthropy, January 13, 2015

In the dead of winter, with a Nor’easter bearing down, what compels someone to travel from Miami to Boston? If you work in Jewish education, it’s the opportunity to see first-hand and learn about all of the elements of a successful project called B’Yadenu. I had the opportunity as well to sit-in on this dissemination, known as the Community Partner Workshop. Important takeaways from this process can help other foundations, schools, and organizations as they decide when and how to disseminate a successful model.

As a demonstration project, B’Yadenu aims to create an effective, sustainable, and adaptable model to provide a Jewish Day School education to more students with a range of special learning needs in the Boston Jewish Day School community. The project is managed by Combined Jewish Philanthropies of Greater Boston in partnership with Gateways: Access to Jewish Education, based in Newton, MA, and Yeshiva University’s Institute for University-School Partnership in New York. Now in its 3^rd year, and with two cohorts of five Boston-area Jewish Days Schools, we are beginning to see positive results. Each participating school has developed a Leadership team consisting of administrators and teacher leaders who plan a professional development program for their school as they create and implement a whole school approach to meet the needs of diverse learners.

For the Jim Joseph Foundation, seeing these initial positive results presents a major opportunity in line with our approach to strategic grantmaking and to model documentation and dissemination. This opportunity is why, for two days last month, community and school representatives from Miami and Detroit flew to Boston to learn about the B’yadenu model and the concepts supporting implementation, the project toolkit, and initial outcomes directly from those leading the project.

The Foundation works with grantees to disseminate models in a variety of ways, from websites to hard copy reports. Different models lend themselves to different forms of dissemination. And, the in-person dissemination of B’Yadenu certainly has its benefits:

• A Substantive Model: When the “host” community—in this case Boston—invites other communities to fly in and learn first-hand about an initiative, there is an implicit message that “we have something working here, and we want to help you adapt it for your community.” When different communities take the time and resources to come together in this manner, all parties involved make a commitment to learn and to take the steps necessary to make successful adaption more likely.

• In-person engagement: Even with all of the technology in our world today, the opportunity to interact in-person for two days allows for deep learning. The Miami and Detroit representatives engaged in exercises, asked pointed questions, and had the opportunity to reflect with the Boston representatives on what this might look like in their communities.

• Seeing is Believing: As part of the two-day dissemination, the Miami and Detroit representatives toured schools where B’Yadenu has led to change. They were able to see what the project actually looks like in implementation. By seeing something working, the planning process—while perhaps still daunting—feels incredibly worthwhile. Julie Lambert, Director of Professional Learning Initiatives at CAJE Miami, attended the Workshop and commented, “It was exciting to learn about the B’Yadenu model. We saw how well the project connects to our work in Miami, and how it can be adapted to further develop what we have accomplished in our day school community. We left Boston with renewed energy and increased knowledge to build our capacity for serving our diverse student population.”

• Looking Inwards: While the Workshop was designed to benefit the Miami and Detroit communities, the preparation that the Boston B’Yadenu team went through to lead an insightful and productive two-day workshop was helpful to them as well. The process forced the team—in a good way—to think deeply about the B’Yadenu design and implementation process, what has worked well, what it would change, and how the outcomes are beginning to take root.

“As a demonstration project, B’Yadenu has benefitted from an exceptional interchange of learning between all of our partners (both schools and regional/national agencies),” said Alan Oliff, Director of Jewish Learning and Engagement at CJP and the Project Manager for B’Yadenu. “The dissemination workshop expanded our learning through the questions, ideas, and concerns raised by the Miami and Detroit participants.  We appreciated the opportunity to share all that we learned and create new networks that can add to the knowledgebase in the field about best practice going forward.”

Sharing the B’Yadenu model at this relatively early juncture in its development provided a substantial learning opportunity for Boston and the communities considering adapting it. The B’Yadenu team will continue to support Miami and Detroit educators as they determine how to adapt B’Yadenu to their communities.

Other Foundation grantees also are currently involved in model documentation and dissemination. As one example, the Jewish Community Federation of San Francisco, the Peninsula, and Marin and Sonoma Counties Early Childhood Education Initiative, is about to embark on model documentation of its successful Jewish Resource Specialist program. This four-year-old initiative is expanding the capacity of 15 Jewish pre-schools to enhance the Jewish learning taking place, as well as to engage families more deeply in Jewish family experiences.   

The recent Grantee Perception Report on the Jim Joseph Foundation indicated clear field interest in the Foundation continuing to broadly share efforts of its grantees.  We hope that the building, documentation, and dissemination of successful models is an effective response to this expressed interest of stakeholders in Jewish education.

“True community does not come into being because people have feelings for each other (though that is required, too), but rather on two accounts: all of them have to stand in a living, reciprocal relationship to a single living center, and they have to stand in a living, reciprocal relationship to one another.” – Martin Buber, I and Thou

The end of the year is a time when I read voraciously. I do so annually wanting to rededicate myself to the concept of “otherness,” which for me derives from a long cherished belief in specific aspects of Martin Buber’s I and Thou.

Reminding myself that there is an ever-present “other” – both in the amount of content in which I lack knowledge and about which I am inquisitive, and in the “thou” that represents the individuality of every single human being whom I encounter – replenishes my senses of wonder and awe. I invariably come away refreshed from what I fancy is my personal celebration of limerence (social critic David Brooks’ term describing a passionate love for learning). And the personal translates to the public: I begin the New Year listening for understanding with heightened attention to my colleagues and Foundation Board of Directors, and searching more circumspectly with Jim Joseph Foundation grantees for effective approaches to Jewish education.

This December’s reading list included texts in several domains: the spiritual geography of place; teacher training; and contemporary Jewish sociology. On its face this looks like an entirely random set of topics, the content of each unrelated to the themes, main ideas, facts, figures, and findings of the other. But it is precisely this breadth of topic that holds its allure in its challenge for me to integrate what appears disparate and even disconnected. Moreover, and most importantly, is the matter of using discovery and learning to inform my Foundation work.

So, by way of example, Richard Cohen’s controversial Israel: Is it Good for the Jews? has no obvious relationship whatsoever to Mark C. Taylor’s Recovering Place: Reflections on Stone Hill. I accept that it is a surprising coupling of texts dissimilar in many ways. Yet Cohen writes incisively about Herzl’s vision of Israel as a place defining who we are as a Jewish people… “a place where a Jew could be a free Jew, a proud Jew, a totally unfettered Jew, but it could also be a place – and this was most important – where a Jew could be free not to be a Jew” (p.13). Taylor, ruminating poetically on a small town in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts, avers “that by pausing to dwell on a particular place, we may once again know who we are by discovering where we are” (p. 3).

Cohen is a syndicated columnist who offers a highly interpretive and personalized brief history of Israel. Taylor, a professor of religion, has compiled a collection of meditations and photographs sanctifying the place where the author lives. Conjoined together, these strikingly different texts awakened in me the need to open my eyes wide to the physical space I inhabit. Absorbing these two sources helps prime me for the June, 2015 Board meeting the Foundation will hold in Israel, knowing that I will have the opportunity to engage deeply with my Israeli brethren and with the sanctity of Eretz Yisrael itself.

While Israel: Is it Good for the Jews and Recovering Place might seem like unlikely companions, Elizabeth Green’s Building a Better Teacher and Sharon Feiman-Nemser’s Teachers as Learners are easily read together, without dissonance. Both books make exceptionally strong cases for further professionalizing the field of teaching.

The story-like narrative Green artfully tells and the insightful, rigorous analysis Feiman-Nemser constructs make a compelling case for an epistemology of teaching – content knowledge about pedagogy – that defy notions of individuals “born to be teachers” or educators achieving pedagogical excellence simply by teaching to a set of imposed curriculum standards. Neither book is about Jewish education or Jewish day schools. But reading these two original contributions to the literature on teacher preparation compels me to wonder to what extent Jewish day schools invest deeply in their teachers’ ongoing professional development.

I think both Feiman-Nemser’s and Green’s books may ultimately be viewed as landmark contributions to the literature each seeks to enrich. True, secular education at certain levels is something different than Jewish day school education. Yet Feiman-Nemser and Green prompt me to think critically about what Jim Joseph Foundation investments in teacher preparation and professional development at HUC, JTS, YU, Brandeis, Pardes, and the Jewish New Teacher Project are producing. I also ponder what role the Consortium for Advanced Studies in Jewish Education (CASJE) can ultimately play in professionalizing day school teaching. These books inspire me to want to believe that the craft of teaching can be mastered. I ponder what a multitude of demonstrably great teachers might mean to the future of Jewish day school education.

My final holiday pairing of Keren McGinity’s groundbreaking Marrying Out and Brandeis University’s Steinhardt Social Research Institute’s American Jewish Population Estimates: 2012 probably seems like another logical concurrent reading of two texts. The Steinhardt study, estimating the U.S. Jewish population at 6.8 million, received a good deal of attention when it was initially released. I find the study to be informative on a number of levels. Perhaps most noteworthy is the authors’ persuasive contention that most Jewish population studies conflate demographic and sociological data. The result is both miscalculation of the population of Jews (underestimating the number) as well as distortion in representations of the nature of contemporary American Jewish life.

McGinity’s fascinating qualitative analysis of the lives of 52 men in interfaith marriages (all of the couples reside in Ann Arbor, Michigan) reveals a host of dynamics having to do with men’s identities that – to my knowledge – have rarely been researched. McGinity’s portraits are realistic, nuanced, and detailed. They uncover a depth of Jewishness and strength of Jewish identity in interfaith marriages that the literature ignores – as do the critics of interfaith marriage.

The research conducted by the Steinhardt Social Research Institute and Keren McGinity makes me wary of many commentators on the 2013 Pew study whose rhetoric of fatalism is countermanded by these empirical and qualitative findings. These texts point me in the direction of ensuring the Jim Joseph Foundation continues to track population studies while separating from them sweeping, flawed generalizations about the character of Jewish life that too often accompany the studies.

My December reading—varied and inspiring it certainly was—again showed me that in nearly all aspects of life, the need for continued learning is great. It is a simple but stark reminder that Jim Joseph Foundation personnel should read widely and respect “otherness” as a means to consider an array of solutions (some still undiscovered) to complex problems of improving Jewish teaching and learning.