The Wexner Foundation Announces Class 5 of Field Fellows

Jewish professionals will receive professional development and education in leadership and Judaic studies over the course of three years

The Wexner Foundation, in partnership with the Jim Joseph Foundation, is pleased to announce Class 5 of the Wexner Field Fellowship. In what was the most competitive pool to date and in the middle of a pandemic, no less, 15 outstanding professionals were selected for this three-year intensive program. Utilizing the diverse, cohort-based learning that is the hallmark of The Wexner Foundation programs, Field Fellows will be exposed to different approaches to leadership and tools for addressing pressing issues in the Jewish community, while being integrated into The Wexner Foundation’s vast network of more than 3,000 professional and volunteer leaders in North America and Israel, including the 45 outstanding professionals who are currently in the Field Fellowship Program, as well as 40 Alumni.

Complete list of Class 5 Fellows:

  • Benjamin Berger, Vice President for Jewish Education, Hillel International, Washington, DC
  • Aaron Cantor, Camp Director, Emma Kaufmann Camp, Jewish Community Center of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA
  • Amy Cohen, Chief Social Services Officer, JFS Executive Director, Shalom Austin, Austin, TX
  • Carrie Darsky, Vice President of Talent Acquisition, Hillel International, Washington, DC
  • Yoni Fein, Head of School, Brauser Maimonides Academy, Ft. Lauderdale, FL
  • Rachel Gottfried-Clancy, Executive Director, Jewish Youth for Community Action, Oakland, CA
  • Shira Hutt, Chief of Staff, Jewish Federation of North America, New York, NY
  • Steven Ingber, Chief Operating Officer, Jewish Federation of Metro Detroit, Bloomfield Hills, MI
  • Nate Looney, Manager of Racial Justice Initiatives, Avodah, New York, NY
  • AnalucĂ­a Lopezrevoredo, Senior Director, Project Shamash, Bend the Arc, San Francisco, CA
  • Danielle Natelson, Design Strategist, UpStart, Los Angeles, CA
  • Mindy Schachtman, Chief Development Officer, Marlene Meyerson JCC Manhattan, New York, NY
  • Alexandra Shklar, Director of Strategic Partnerships and the Centennial Campaign, JDC, New York NY
  • Dov Wilker, Atlanta Regional Director, American Jewish Committee, Atlanta, GA
  • Alex Zablotsky, Managing Director, PJ Library, Harold Grinspoon Foundation, Agawam, MA

The Wexner Foundation has more than 30 years of experience developing excellence in Jewish professionals and volunteer leaders in North America. The Wexner Field Fellowship was created in 2013 in partnership with the Jim Joseph Foundation to focus on developing promising Jewish professionals’ leadership skills while enveloping them in a rich network of Jewish colleagues. Wexner Field Fellows engage in a diverse, cohort-based leadership learning program.

Fellows are selected based on their past accomplishments, current motivation and engagement, and exceptional attributes they will contribute to the cohort of 15 diverse Jewish professionals of which they will be a part. Class 5 will start the program virtually and ultimately come together through in-person intensive institutes where they will be exposed to Jewish educational and professional growth opportunities, while addressing their unique needs of career and personal progress.

“The need to support emerging professional leaders in the Jewish ecosystem has never been more pressing. As we’ve seen during this unique application cycle, the field is richly blessed. I am excited about the ways in which these 15 midcareer Jewish professionals will contribute to the Wexner Field Fellowship and more importantly to the Jewish organizations and communities they will lead,” said Rabbi B. Elka Abrahamson, President of The Wexner Foundation. “This new cohort of transformational leaders will add mightily to the community of Wexner Fellows and Alumni shaping the Jewish future.”

As with the first four classes of Field Fellows, Class 5 is comprised of dynamic Jewish professionals at pivotal moments in their careers. Fellows work in Jewish federations, summer camps, advocacy and social justice organizations, day schools, national organizations and local institutions across North America. To get more info about each Fellow, please click here.

“This cohort represents the Wexner Foundation’s ongoing commitment to elevate diverse voices and perspectives among leaders in Jewish engagement and education,” says Barry Finestone, President and CEO of the Jim Joseph Foundation. “There are deeply committed, talented leaders across the Jewish professional landscape. The Wexner Field Fellowship offers 15 of them a special opportunity to learn and grow at a moment filled with immense challenges and opportunities.”

As part of this three-year intensive professional development program, Wexner Field Fellows:

  • Become part of a selective cohort of lifelong professional learners.
  • Learn with amazing leadership teachers and Jewish educators.
  • Receive one-on-one professional coaching and Jewish learning, along with access to funds toward customized professional development opportunities.
  • Develop a nuanced appreciation for the diversity of the North American Jewish community.
  • Focus on developing strengths in adaptive leadership, storytelling, difficult conversations, negotiation and other crucial leadership skills.

About The Wexner Foundation
Led by Leslie and Abigail Wexner, The Wexner Foundation focuses on the development of Jewish professional and
volunteer leaders in North America, public leaders in Israel and Jewish teenagers in Columbus. With a respect for the
diversity of Jewish life, cohort-based learning and the development of a network of leaders, The Wexner Foundation has
never wavered from its focus on Jewish leadership excellence. www.wexnerfoundation.org

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Hadar Institute – Strategic Planning During a Pandemic

As the Hadar Institute rapidly responded to offer new digital Jewish learning and engagement in 2020, behind the scenes it was conducting a major strategic planning process. Always an important undertaking, developing a strategic plan during a pandemic was both uniquely challenging and one that offered unexpected opportunities. While the pandemic presented unprecedented obstacles, the strategic planning process provided a sense of grounding and the ability to look toward the future in an otherwise difficult time.

The future Hadar envisions is not limited by the current reality. But Hadar took learnings from experiments during the pandemic and incorporated those into their plan. Hadar’s leadership tried new ways of learning they never would have imagined possible before, such as digital education offerings on such a large scale, and new formats for learning, such as digital cohorts.

Hadar Jewish EducationFor example, the ubiquity of online learning in 2020 enabled Hadar to broaden its understanding of who they might teach beyond young adults. In a two-month period of online learning, Hadar taught as many people as it typically teaches in person over an 8 month period. More than 40 percent of those people were new users to Hadar. This expanded reach continued beyond the first few months of the pandemic: Hadar welcomed 30,000 participants to more than 800 class sessions since March. Thus, Hadar recognized that online learning had to become a mainstay and an integrated part of their plan.

Project Zug [Hadar’s online 1-1 learning platform] offers an easy on-ramp to making Torah learning a regular practice in people’s lives. It has certainly become part of my life! – 2020 Project Zug Participant

During the pandemic, Hadar also capitalized on years of investment in the children and families space through Pedagogy of Partnership (PoP), among other initiatives, to run new experimental learning opportunities for this demographic. Hadar’s Mishnah club began in mid-March and a grandparents and grandchildren learning event later in the year enabled Hadar to reach children and parents directly. These innovations and others were so successful that Hadar launched a new Children’s and Families Department. The strategic planning process underway as these experiments occurred enabled Hadar to concretize its vision for this department moving forward.

Hadar was my introduction to Jewish life and thought. It was the first place I had role models for how to live a deeply committed, gender-egalitarian life, and has helped me to develop a deep identification with the Jewish tradition. – Yeshivat Hadar Alum

Along with these learnings, the organization’s growth from the first strategic plan led to mergers and acquisitions of different programs—Hadar Students Learningincluding the Maimonides Moot Court Competition, the JJ Greenberg Institute, Project Zug and Pedagogy of Partnership—that help chart an ambitious and exciting path forward. This path encompasses five goals over the next four years, which Hadar details in its plan:

  1. Vibrant Center: Strengthen our immersive learning center (yeshiva) to fully anchor all parts of our vision.
  2. Lived Judaism: Enable Jews to meaningfully explore and sustainably live out Hadar’s holistic vision of Jewish practice.
  3. Meaningful Torah: Maximize the impact of Hadar’s Torah by reaching more people in more ways through meaningful content.
  4. Our Work in Israel: Enhance the visibility, vitality and acceptance of Hadar’s model in mainstream Israeli society.
  5. Organizational Capacity: Build the organizational capacity, structure and foundation to achieve and uphold Hadar’s goals.

View Hadar Institute’s Strategic Plan at Hadar.org/plan. The Jim Joseph Foundation is a supporter of Hadar.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sifting Through the Mixed Blessings Created by the Pandemic

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.

Learning from Grantee-Partners: A Series on Insights from Leaders in the Field

As a Foundation that wants to always learn—one of our internal values Hitlamdoot—we need to hear directly from leaders and practitioners in the field. Particularly at this moment, understanding what these individuals are experiencing, thinking, doing, and planning is integral to building our team’s knowledge base about the many subfields that makeup the broader world of Jewish education and engagement.

In this vein, representatives from different grantee-partners are speaking with the Foundation each month in Learning Sessions. While initially we planned for these sessions to be entirely internal, the insights and perspectives we are hearing from grantee-partners will be interesting and informative for others as well. We continue to approach our work with Kavanah, intention, to always elevate the efforts of others who help us pursue our mission. And we look forward to sharing brief recaps of each Learning Session. Read the first recap on learnings from Daniel Septimus, CEO of Sefaria, here.

As always, please let us know if you have any questions.

Learning Session Guests:
Deborah Meyer, founder and CEO, and Rabbi Tamara Cohen, VP of Program Strategy, Moving Traditions

Deborah Meyer, founder and CEO, shared the inspiration and impetus for launching Moving Traditions in 2005 with then Board Chair Sally Gottesman:

  • Identified the need to focus on building teen wellness as part of building Jewish identity
  • Recognized the value to teens of fostering their commitment to social justice
  • Sought to embolden Jewish teens to create community and world they want to live in

“When we started out, our concerns were focused on Jewish teen girls,” says Deborah. “Girls are at high risk of anxiety and depression as they enter adolescence. We wanted to connect Jewish teachings with social-emotional learnings from psychology and education to keep girls healthy and whole, as they enter adolescence and throughout their teen years. We wanted the Jewish community to understand the issues and social pressures that girls face in our society, and to address these issues as a core part of the Jewish education curriculum.”

After launching its Rosh Hodesh program for teen girls—and experiencing the success and demand for the program—Moving Traditions realized how important it was to offer something similar to Jewish boys. Deborah adds, “It turns out patriarchy isn’t good for boys either.” Like Rosh Hodesh, the Shevet program is a space for Jewish teen boys to come together in small groups and talk with each other and an adult male mentor about the joys and challenges of their lives.

When VP of Program Strategy Rabbi Tamara Cohen joined Moving Traditions, she created Tzelem, in collaboration with Keshet, as a third parallel group for non-binary and transgender teens. Since then, some Tzelem groups have expanded to serve any teen looking for an affirming monthly LGBTQ+ Jewish space. Today these three programs—which all blend social emotional learning, a progressive understanding of gender and society, and Judaism—are one of Moving Traditions’ suite of offerings for  on its pathway to flourishing teens:

Taken together, these programs provide meaning, purpose, and health. Through these programs, and by training adults who work with teens, Moving Traditions opens a Jewish space for all teens to explore identity, gender, and the joys and challenges of adolescence.

While the field of Jewish education and engagement today sees building mental health as essential, Moving Traditions has been pioneering this approach for 16 years. Two key learnings that deeply inform its work today are the ideas that:

  • Resilience is at the heart, where social justice and wellness intersect. When teens work for change, they reduce their stress and build resilience, while also building communities and a society that is stronger and more just. “What’s good for individuals is good for society and the wider world,” adds Deborah.
  • Building “members” of society is necessary and important work. In addition to leadership development, Moving Traditions strives to develop engaged citizens, active “members” of their community. Skills needed to be an active member, such as empathy, communication, and navigating differences are taught in its teen groups, Rosh Hodesh, Shevet, and Tzelem.

Responsive Curriculum and Teens’ Needs

In 2020, Moving Traditions conducted a rapid needs assessment to understand, in the midst of the pandemic, what teens and their families were experiencing and what they needed from congregations and other Jewish communal organizations. Moving Traditions found that teens are experiencing stress and feelings of dissociation from school—social distancing is the exact opposite of what teens need, developmentally—and the organization is concerned about long-term trauma. At the same time, teens are incredibly resilient. They are creative and they want to help their families and community, and work for social justice. “We can help teens find their outlet for making a difference,” says Tamara.

Part of what we are doing right now is trying to help teens navigate risk-taking during these hard months of the pandemic. Moving Traditions generally approaches healthy risk-taking with openness, wanting teens to learn from their good and bad decisions. With the pandemic and the heightened consequences of bad decisions, we still have to honor the agency of teens and yet, perhaps more than ever we need to help them find the right balance.
– Tamara Cohen

During the pandemic, Moving Traditions generated responsive curriculum for its teen groups on the emerging issues that matter most to teens to engage them with a sense of meaning and purpose:

Seeing that all Jewish teen educators needed curricula that were easy to use and ready to engage teens, in addition to the responsive curricula it shared widely with all Jewish educators, Moving Traditions created Heart to Heart, a five-session course of intimate conversations on key issues in teen life and in our society today.  The program is a good fit for institutions looking for a way to offer engaging programming to mixed gender groups of teens in a different format than the organization’s Teen Groups. The experience offers value in and of itself and can serve as a gateway for institutions and teens to commit to Teen Groups.

By pivoting to online training, Moving Traditions trained twice the number of educators and clergy than previous years, and will continue using virtual platforms moving forward. In addition, they are addressing the needs of parents.

Broadening Impact and Looking Ahead

“We want teens and Jewish educators to have more access to our programs,” Tamara says. “We are focused on six core cities and we would like to expand and reach more teens by partnering with more institutions throughout the country.”

To scale its work, Moving Tradition’s strategy is to leverage partnerships—with national youth groups, regional teen groups, and individual synagogues, JCCs, camps, and other local organizations. Instead of hiring staff to directly deliver its programs to Jewish youth in every region, Moving Traditions conducts research and develops resources—and then partners with local organizations to implement its programs. To ensure quality and preparedness, Moving Traditions trains its partner educators and clergy. This approach enables Moving Traditions have greater impact and to create change from within the Jewish community.

An exception to this strategy is the Kol Koleinu Feminist Fellowship, led by Moving Traditions in collaboration with URJ and USY, which now has 50 national feminist fellows in 10-12th grade. The fellowship emboldens Jewish teens to lead social change initiatives for their peers across the country. For example, in October, Kol Koleinu fellows led a three-part workshop series they created for new voters, “Voting with a Feminist Lens.”

“We are leveraging the passion of Jewish teens for social justice,” adds Tamara. “We equip Kol Koleinu Fellows with mentors and frameworks for creating changemaking projects which they implement for and with the Jewish teens in their networks. In this way we are fostering social justice leadership and Jewish engagement for this generation of teens.”

Partnering with national organizations such as URJ and USY, with regional Teen Initiatives, as well as with individual synagogues, day schools, and camps, Moving Traditions is thinking about how it can further leverage its collaborations to engage more Jewish youth across the country.

“As a result of Moving Traditions’ work, clergy and educators are joining our idea to embrace wellness and social justice activism. We are actually changing the Jewish teen curriculum. As a result, people are experiencing Judaism as a force for good.
– Deborah Meyer

 

 

 

 

How Essential is Jewish Education? COVID-19 Brings Some Clarity

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 19th. 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.

Forged by Jewish Historical Experience: The Study of Jewish History as a Crucible for Jewish Professional Learning

It’s May 2020. In North America, the COVID-19 pandemic has been wreaking havoc with people’s work and lives for almost three months. The participants in Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion’s Executive M.A. Program in Jewish Education are about to start a new course, the 10th in their two-year degree program. The program has a blended format, part online, part in person. This six-week course–XED 505 Jewish Historical Experience–is taught entirely online by Prof. Leah Hochman, an intellectual history professor at HUC-JIR who also teaches at the University of Southern California. As before every course, Hochman asks her students to complete a short survey about their prior experiences teaching or learning modern Jewish history. She checks what the students are curious about and whether they have any concerns about which they want her to be aware.

How this course–part academic exploration, part personal odyssey–touched the lives of its participants provokes questions about how Jewish educators might grow through academic and professional learning experiences, and toward what ends.

In 2018, HUC-JIR received funding along with nine other educator training programs from the Jim Joseph Foundation to create professional development opportunities. As part of the evaluation work for the initiative, Rosov Consulting is producing a series of case studies of the peak moments–some form of intensive, residential, or retreat component–of each program. This third case study explores HUC-JIR’s program.

“Forged by Jewish Historical Experience: The Study of Jewish History as a Crucible for Jewish Professional Learning,” Rosov Consulting, October 2020

 

Look out! An Emerging Shift in the Jewish Education Labor Market

Since the COVID-19 pandemic first disrupted life and work in North America in March 2020, a steady stream of reports has provided updates about “What’s going on in Jewish education.” Informed by leading practitioners, these reports help construct a picture of how educational institutions have been hit by the pandemic and how demand for their services has been impacted.

Over the next few weeks, we will share insights gained from a distinct and different vantage point. Our data come from a major study of the career trajectories of Jewish educators led by CASJE (Consortium for Applied Studies in Jewish Education) and conducted by Rosov Consulting. 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. By exploring the marketplace for Jewish educators now, we opened a new window on the broader landscape of Jewish education and its current state.

Our findings are reported in an interim report, Facing the Future: Mapping the Marketplace of Jewish Education during COVID-19. Over the next few weeks, we share with readers of eJewish Philanthropy what we found as seen through the lens of human capital. In this first piece we discuss a potentially significant shift in Jewish education from a labor market of part-time to full-time work.

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Historically, the field of Jewish education has been heavily populated by part-timers. Across the largest sectors of Jewish education – congregational schools, early childhood education and day schools – about a third of Jewish educators are part-timers. It has long been argued that it will be hard to professionalize the field of Jewish education while this situation persists; institutions are reluctant to invest, for example, in the professional development of those who “only” work part time.

The exigencies of the current moment have seen the beginning of a seismic shift. In those educational sectors that were among the first to reopen following the spring closedown – early childhood centers in the summer, day schools in the fall – health regulations have limited the number of children who can gather in one space. Programs are restricted in their use of substitutes and “floaters,” part-time or occasional staff used to plug gaps in staffing rosters. Take the case of early childhood education: parental demand is down, with some parents expressing anxiety about returning to any kind of “center.” Nevertheless, because of health regulations, centers are having to staff up. They’re finding that part-time staff are not so willing to return to work – it’s not worth the health risk in a sector where compensation and benefits have been intractably subpar and part-timers are not their family’s primary breadwinners. The best way to break this jam is to employ a smaller number of full-time staff.

In day schools, where Heads had to plan for a wide variety of scenarios – fully online, in person pods, and some hybrid – the solution has been to build bench strength. Some schools are finding that it pays to double down on full-time teaching assistants who are often cheaper and more flexible than regular appointments. Assistants help keep ratios down in the classroom or in breakout rooms on Zoom. Other are opting for a more expensive alternative: they’re hiring permanent substitutes who they don’t have to share with other schools. They’re hiring “plug and play” folks who can ensure that schools aren’t caught short if a staff member has to be quarantined, and, again, they help reduce student-teacher ratios. With many schools making clear they won’t accommodate teachers who can’t be at school in person because of healthcare or childcare needs, there is also a good deal of faculty turnover. As with early childhood education, the solution is staff consolidation: fewer people working longer hours.

The dynamic in congregational education has been different, but the outcome in terms of staffing is much the same. Programs have been hit by a barrage of financial blows. Congregations have cut budgets for a variety of widely reported reasons. Parents have pulled children who have little appetite to spend even more hours on-screen for “supplementary” Jewish education; they don’t see the point in paying both synagogue fees and afterschool fees when the synagogue is physically closed or they can attend services anywhere in the world, remotely.

The congregations that have embraced the challenge of remote provision, investing in virtual learning platforms and dispersing their offerings across the week, have discovered some promising advantages. Operating online, they’re no longer tied to the vagaries of the local labor market for part-time staff; they can offer more work to their star performers, even those who may have moved out of town. The key is to find people who, in the words of one interviewee, are high tech and high touch. Education Directors report that these online offerings have been especially welcomed by parents; they’re not limited to specific hours and, of course, don’t require sitting in afterschool traffic. When schools can fully reopen, these alternative modes of delivery have every chance of remaining viable and appealing; they are much more in sync with families’ lives.

The pandemic has been painful, often heartbreaking. When the pain dissipates, we may see its contribution to the restructuring of the marketplace of Jewish education in ways that once seemed a pipedream. In some sectors, there might be fewer providers, operating with leaner, higher-quality teams, offering a more diverse array of programs, some of which will no longer be tied to bricks and mortar. In other sectors, the numbers of providers might not change much, but the providers could be employing more coherently structured full-time teams. This adjustment has potential to be a significant enabler of the upgrading of this field to a stature that reflects its contribution to Jewish life.

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

Alex Pomson is Principal and Managing Director at Rosov Consulting.

originally published in eJewish Philanthropy

Learning from Grantee-Partners: A Series on Insights from Leaders in the Field

As a Foundation that wants to always learn—one of our internal values Hitlamdoot—we need to hear directly from leaders and practitioners in the field. Particularly at this moment, understanding what these individuals are experiencing, thinking, doing, and planning is integral to building our team’s knowledge base about the many subfields that makeup the broader world of Jewish education and engagement. 

In this vein, representatives from different grantee-partners are speaking with the Foundation each month in Learning Sessions. While initially we planned for these sessions to be entirely internal, the insights and perspectives we are hearing from grantee-partners will be interesting and informative for others as well. We continue to approach our work with Kavanah, intention, to always elevate the efforts of others who help us pursue our mission. And we look forward to sharing brief recaps of each Learning Session here.

As always, please let us know if you have any questions.

Learning Session Guest: Daniel Septimus, CEO, Sefaria

Daniel shared the genesis and history of Sefaria, which offers important context when thinking about how ideas come to life:

  • Neither of Sefaria’s founders came from traditional, formal Jewish education backgrounds.
  • They saw a void and a stark limitation to accessing English language Jewish texts online.
  • The most difficult aspect of beginning this type of venture was raising enough funds initially to make it possible. 

Three Pillars

Sefaria has three pillars that define who they are and why they do this work. These pillars strike a balance between a focused approach and an understanding that they don’t always know what they don’t know. Their pillars are:

1. Access

  • Jewish texts are the Jewish people’s collective inheritance and they belong to all of us. Accordingly, all Jewish texts should be as accessible as possible—in translation and available online for free.
  • Sefaria aims to make these texts not just available but accessible—meaning comprehensible and meaningful to those who encounter them. 
  • Sefaria believes it can use technology to help people find things they wouldn’t find on their own.

2. Infrastructure 

  • Sefaria considers this to be its most important pillar; its core value proposition is a free database—a project that if done right only needs to be done once. 
  • They don’t know what kind of devices people will be studying Torah on in 20 years, but they know those devices will be chomping on digital data. 
  • They want technologists in the future to be able to use Sefaria and this is why they hold tight to their Open Source philosophy—where everything on Sefaria is free for use and reuse, forever.

3. Education

  • Sefaria operates on the principle that Sefaria can make Jewish learning not just easier but better. 
  • Sefaria can power education in nearly any environment—camp; rabbinic; school; home; and elsewhere.

Without Sefaria I would be stuck as I literally cannot afford many sefarim and do not live close to a Beit Midrash I can easily access as a woman. It is brilliant and more translations and more texts are always welcomed by those of us who do not have top notch Hebrew and Aramaic. – Sefaria user

How Sefaria Operates
Sefaria operates like a technology company. They build a Minimum Viable Product (MVP), put it out into the world, get feedback on its usefulness, and make changes if it makes sense to advance that product. As Daniel says, “this is a much different way of working than building a five-year plan.”

Daniel also notes that this approach does create challenges with traditional funders and fundraising. “As a general rule, we don’t promise product features. We can’t promise it until we do it.”

New Developments and Challenges Ahead
New features connect texts on Sefaria to diverse sources on a wide array of external Jewish websites, media, and other organizations, broadening the commentary and perspectives with which users can engage. 

As the organization looks ahead, there is an exciting element of the unknown, rich with possibilities. Daniel notes, “For the first time we know we’ll be around in five more years. While opportunities are vast, it’s less obvious what the priorities should be. But that’s fun. At some point, your new directions are more compelling than your original directions. This creates a need to prioritize or to get more resources.”

One thing Sefaria knows for sure is that it will not compromise on its core principle to offer open access. Sefaria’s “brand is rooted in the fact that we are this source of infinite generosity.” With that in mind, Sefaria is thinking about how to translate texts into more languages, how to make Torah written by women more accessible, and how to create opportunities for a deeper experience, like matching people for chevrutah study.

 

The Jewish Teen Education and Engagement Funder Collaborative is Offering Three Common Measurement Tools at No Cost

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].

Duties of the Heart: Building Our Collective Resilience

Bahya Ibn Pakuda, an eleventh century Spanish Jewish philosopher and rabbi, wrote the first treatise on Jewish ethics called Duties of the Heart (Chovot HaLevavot). His Jewish wisdom has served as inspiration for centuries and his book is often celebrated in the days leading up to Rosh Hashana.  He proposes that the obligations of Torah fall into two categories: those that we perform with our limbs (Hovot HaEvarim) and those that are the realm of the soul/heart/spirit (Hovot HaLev). He points out that the “duties of the heart” are often neglected. Yet, at this moment in particular, we must elevate “duties of the heart,” nurturing people’s spiritual and holistic wellness to build resilience, so they have the strength and skills to adapt to and overcome challenges of today and the future.

One of the Jim Joseph Foundation’s core assumptions is that in a world that is constantly shifting and changing, there remains a strong and persistent human desire for connection, meaning, and purpose. As Jews, we celebrate our people’s history of resilience—an ability to adapt Judaism and Jewish life over thousands of years to meet these needs. Living through today’s great disruption and evolution, our community again has demonstrated dedication and creativity to offer Jewish learning with connection, meaning, and purpose in mind. Our community also has witnessed, and tried to respond, to pressures on our collective mental health and wellbeing.

As always, the High Holidays were an opportunity to start anew. Our preparations and rituals invited us to care not only for our own wellbeing but also for the wellbeing of strangers, our loved ones, and our broader community and world. These annual rituals remind us of the “duties of the heart” and our interdependence. Even amidst social distance, we are all connected and linked in some ways—and building our collective resilience will help us to face challenges ahead.

Opportunity to Elevate Wellness
Unlike more isolated inflection points or personal times of change, we are all facing this reality together. But as we have seen from so many organizations and individuals, this reality also presents opportunities to think about Jewish life in new ways. We have the opportunity to prioritize an upgraded wellness toolkit to strengthen our resilience and to reimagine Jewish community building, meaning-making, engagement, and education.

Even before the pandemic, teens and young adults faced increasing rates of depression, anxiety, stress, and wellness-related challenges. Research shows teens and young adults today are struggling the most and are actively seeking more connection and support. In a study conducted this summer, 63% of Jewish 18-40 year-olds reported heightened depression or anxiety but only 37% had sought out mental health support or professional counseling. At that time, 70% of young adults responded that it was particularly important for them to connect to their Jewish identity, and 63% had participated in something Jewish virtually since the pandemic began. In another study led by the Foundation for Jewish Camp (FJC),  more than 55% of FJC’s teen and young adult survey respondents said they would welcome more mental, emotional, social, and spiritual health support, and 79% cited feeling that their Jewish friends had helped them cope with the pandemic. As a community, we can further elevate access to wellness support. Participants are showing up to programming with high anxiety and stress. Many are choosing to engage as one way to help mitigate and work through these challenges.

As funders and conveners, we have an opportunity to amplify our support of learners and educators. According to a recent study of professional development programs funded by the Jim Joseph Foundation, educators and program leaders reported that supporting emotional well-being is, for many, of equal priority to providing meaningful intellectual experiences. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, a motivational theory in psychology comprising a five-tier model of human needs, states that basic needs (like safety, security, food and water) and psychological needs (like esteem, belongingness, and love), must be met before self-fulfillment needs (like achieving one’s full potential). Thus, we must not only recognize the importance of these foundational needs, but also support them in order to achieve the highest levels of connection, meaning, and purpose. Through this lens, the connection between wellness and education become crystal clear: a learner cannot get the most from a learning experience or a teacher cannot educate with greatest efficacy unless their base needs of wellbeing, feeling safe and secure, and fulfilled. 

Looking to Jewish Sources for Support
Research, particularly from the last ten years, affirms that young people and families look to Jewish sources for connection and support. Thankfully, many Jewish organizations have built their wellness capacity and core competencies during this time too. A number of youth-serving organizations (YSOs) have recognized the importance of supporting and elevating teen and young adult wellness, offering their professionals trainings to serve the holistic needs of young people, addressed them through a Jewish lens. One example of this is the Youth Mental Health First Aid Training curriculum and certification program developed by National Council of Behavioral Health (it’s noteworthy that this is now available online). YSOs recognize that for their participants to meaningfully engage in programming, the wellness of those participants must be addressed. BBYO’s The Center for Adolescent Wellness and Hillel’s HillelWell, for example, support the mental health of their young people. Other organizations rooted in wellness and spirituality since their founding, like Moving Traditions, Institute for Jewish Spirituality, and At The Well, are supporting the field right now by making their trainings and community-building experiences accessible through new partnerships with organizations that want resources to support their constituents. At a time when bandwidth is stretched, these collaborations are critical. The power of the collective shows that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

The Path Forward to Meet Wellness Needs of Youth
Today, organizations that serve young people recognize that their staff are on the front lines of support for their young people’s mental health. And while Jewish education has much to offer in the way of this support, many educators and other leaders do not have the appropriate skills and training to do this part of their work. Thankfully, however, the void of expertise in this area is slowly decreasing.

In January 2020, Jewish Teen Education & Engagement Funder Collaborative (the Funder Collaborative), convened a Wellness Gathering with Jewish experts, funders, and practitioners from across the country to make sense of developments in the wellness field. The convening sought to weave together and integrate the fields of wellness, education and engagement in the Jewish community by highlighting effective and meaningful work in this space. In turn, the convening revealed significant gaps in offerings, affordability, and accessibility. Since then, the Funder Collaborative, in partnership with YSO leaders, has led efforts to advance and coordinate the somewhat segmented and siloed Jewish wellness field and to connect engagement and clinical efforts that are underway. These efforts included a second convening of the wellness collective just last month, this time under the name “Resiliency Roundtable,” speaking to the resilience work that must be done to strengthen the social-emotional health of learners and educators. The dozens of participating organizations are working more together to build this field and offer best in class resources to meet the growing need for wellness support in the Jewish education community. If successful, the Resiliency Roundtable will position young people, educators, leaders, and communities writ large to be more resilient not only during this crisis but also into the future.

We know that Judaism has much to offer people searching for connection, meaning, and purpose in times of joy and sorrow. Tikkun olam, repairing world, is a familiar framing in the Jewish educational world. It is embraced by many Jewish learners and has inspired generations of Jews to collective action. This year, it feels important that we elevate the lesser-known notion of tikkun hanefesh, repair of the soul, and to recognize how it connects to the much-needed work of repairing the world. The idea of tikkun (repair) doesn’t imply inner brokenness; it is a recognition of a lack of balance.  Jewish education that prioritizes the importance of holistic wellbeing must provide a pathway for this tikkun hanefesh—for this rebalancing. Jewish wisdom and elevating “duties of the heart” will enable us to better repair ourselves and build our resilience so that we can care for others and our collective community.

Rachel Shamash Schneider is a Program Officer at the Jim Joseph Foundation. Sara Allen is Executive Director of the Jewish Teen Education and Engagement Funder Collaborative.

 

People Remember How You (and Your Virtual Event) Made Them Feel

As the ongoing pandemic asks us to protect one another by staying apart, it has been difficult to remain at home, distanced from the activities many of us turn to for social, emotional and spiritual fulfillment.

Many organizations across the Jewish sector are working to meaningfully engage young Jews in digital spaces during this time and are rightfully asking questions about how to create the most impactful virtual events that breakthrough the “Zoom fatigue” many people are experiencing.

New research from the Schusterman Family Foundation and Jim Joseph Foundation explores this question and provides organizations with substantive guidance. The research reveals the importance of designing virtual gatherings intentionally by centering attendees’ emotional experience alongside the high-quality content prioritized for in-person gatherings. The research looks specifically at young Jewish Americans ages 18-40; however, the findings can apply to a wide range of sectors and organizations.

So what makes one virtual event more effective than another? Successful virtual events stand out by meeting one or more of three key needs: community, fulfillment and fun. 

Great virtual events leave participants feeling happy, relaxed, connected and twice as likely to attend another event by the same or another organization. Poorly executed or unsatisfying virtual events, on the other hand, can have a negative effect on participants, leaving them more tired, disconnected and frustrated, and more than 50% less likely to participate in another event by any organization.

You can read more about the findings of the research here.

Our research offers insights on how to measure the impact of Jewish engagement opportunities when it comes to qualities such as fulfillment, fun and community.

Indeed, we often speak with grantees about the struggle to develop and measure program outcomes. It can be challenging to measure changes that may not present for some time and to identify measures to track progress toward those outcomes along the way.

This research points to emotion as a leading indicator of outcomes—individuals who felt positively after an event (happy, connected, relaxed, empowered) were more likely to feel the event was a worthwhile use of their time, tell others about their experience, engage in a new ritual or practice at home, and attend another virtual event.

While output measures like satisfaction and feelings have been measured less often, this research shows that measuring these outputs can be an important indication of progress toward successfully engaging and retaining participants.

As we design for virtual events that include both content and emotional goals, we also need to design for how we measure both. To that end, we are sharing the survey questions from our own research to consider including in your next post-program survey or program evaluation.

How satisfied were you with the experience?
•    Very satisfied
•    Somewhat satisfied
•    Not very satisfied
•    Not satisfied at all

How did you feel after the event? Please select all that apply. 
●    Anxious
●    Awkward
●    Connected
●    Disconnected
●    Empowered
●    Frustrated
●    Happy
●    Informed
●    Invigorated
●    Lonely
●    Relaxed
●    Tired
●    Uncomfortable
●    Something else __________

Would you attend or participate in an event hosted by [organization name] again? 
●    Definitely
●    Probably
●    Might or might not
●    Probably not
●    Definitely not

When events meet the most pressing needs of young Jews—when they laugh even if they also feel overwhelmed, when they meet someone new and feel just a little less alone, when they discover a new ritual to help them mark time during endless weeks—that is when the content can make a difference.

How are you designing for and measuring virtual engagement?

Rella Kaplowitz is the Senior Program Officer for Evaluation and Learning at the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation, making sure the Foundation has the right information to strengthen its work. During the pandemic, Rella and her family are finding community, fulfillment and fun through virtual tot Shabbats and storytime with cousins, family art time, Challah baking and dance parties.

Stacie Cherner is the Director of Learning and Evaluation at the Jim Joseph Foundation where she oversees the research and evaluation work of the Foundation. She and her husband are in California, living (with one wifi connection) with a teenager and young adult who are also trying to find community, fulfillment and fun online and offline.

 

 

 

Zooming Toward the Future: The Challenges, Strategies, and Opportunities of Distance Learning

To help the Jim Joseph Foundation and the field better understand how pivoting to distance learning has unfolded for Jewish education and professional development organizations, Rosov Consulting interviewed nine program providers from the Jim Joseph Foundation Professional Development Initiative (PDI) cohort, along with five other Foundation grantees that operate in overlapping fields. The interviews explored the initial choices organizations made and how those choices evolved over time. We investigated the challenges that programs faced when moving online, whether and how they were able to address those challenges, the positive “silver linings” of being forced to reimagine how they do their work, and which dimensions might continue once people can gather in person again.

This report synthesizes the key themes we heard in these conversations, categorized into the challenges programs have faced in the pivot to distance learning, the strategies to overcome them that have proved most effective, and the opportunities (both predictable and surprising) that have emerged from the crisis. We conclude by sharing organizational leaders’ perspectives on how they envision the “new normal” in a post-COVID world.

Zooming Toward the Future: The Challenges, Strategies, and Opportunities of Distance Learning, Rosov Consulting, September 2020