Foundation News —Chip Edelsberg

Foundation News
—Chip Edelsberg, Executive Director

April 2008

The Jim Joseph Foundation (JJF) Directors, in their first 2008 Board meeting, approved two major and, we believe, significant capacity building grants together totaling more than 23 million dollars. These grants will strengthen Birthright Israel Foundation and Hillel in engaging young adults ages 18-30. The investment of 12.5 million dollars granted to Birthright Israel and 10.7 million dollars awarded to Hillel (each over five years) will enable both organizations to move forward with the implementation of programs that are of key strategic priority to them.

The programs themselves—Taglit-Birthright Israel community trips and alumni engagement in fifteen cities, and Hillel’s expansion of its successful Campus Educator/Campus Entrepreneur program to ten campuses—will be fueled by new types of Jewish professionals. These professionals will organize and educate peer groups of young adults to enter into Judaism’s 3500 year old conversation on essential, enduring questions of what it means, Jewishly, to lead a fulfilling, ethical life. The engagement that both organizations envision is that young adults voluntarily, but compelled by their peers, will examine their lives through the lens of their Jewish faith. They will access Jewish learning to both enrich their self understanding and guide them on their life’s journey, connecting them communally as they move through the life cycle.

Birthright Israel Foundation has committed to raise an additional 12.5 million dollars to match JJF’s lead gift. It is also important to note that JJF awarded 5 million dollars more (1 million dollars annually for five years) to provide trip support for community-based Taglit-Birthright Israel trips in the fifteen communities that will be selected for participation in this initiative.

Birthright Israel’s thinking is bold and the plan JJF co-created with them ambitious. I encourage you to examine a draft of the theory of change that Rabbi Daniel Brenner carefully constructed to gain insight into the conceptual framework of the initiative.

As an added feature to this Birthright Israel funding, JJF and the Andrea and Charles Bronfman Philanthropies, joined by the Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, and Toronto Federations, are funding Birthright Israel alumni studies in these four communities. Professors Len Saxe and Ted Sasson are the principal investigators (view the study’s description—proposal).

JJF’s grant to Hillel enables Hillel to continue its Campus Entrepreneurs Initiative (CEI) and to expand its Experiential Educator Exemplar (E³) Program to ten campuses. The E³ Program places highly-trained Jewish educators on campuses to offer in-depth Jewish educational content to students. The E³ Program has met with considerable success during its two-year pilot at Hillel’s Yitzhak Rabin Center for Jewish Life at UCLA.

The new E³ professionals will work in tandem with Campus Entrepreneurs, college students who engage peers to involve them in Jewish life. The Campus Entrepreneurs Initiative, now in its second year, employs 114 students on 12 campuses. The CEI interns will engage an estimated 7,020 students this year. Hillel projects that the JJF grant will enable it to engage an additional 30,000 students in the next five years. The grant also enables Hillel to provide significant follow through with students who participate in the Taglit-Birthright Israel program.

For Hillel’s part, JJF funding ideally will signal like-minded funders to consider a similar kind of grant support. Hillel aspires to grow its Campus Educators/Campus Entrepreneur program to over 50 campuses in a five to seven year period. JJF funding will enable ten campuses to participate and also help Hillel to build support for systems (management, administration, and technology) to support the initiative. Hillel will be actively seeking additional funders.

Together, these two initiatives evidence potential for engaging up to 100,000 young Jewish adults for whom Judaism is currently only tangentially related to their identities. The complementary nature of the two initiatives position the Jewish world to be responsive to realities of the “twenty-something” Jew in ways neither commonly available nor readily accessible now. Working together, Birthright Israel, Hillel, and JJF postulate that we have designed a scalable model for invigorating the lives of young adults, ages 18-30, with Jewish content, values, and meaning.

JJF has obviously embarked on an effort with this venture to use its philanthropic resources to measurably impact the lives of young Jewish adults. The funds awarded have balanced JJF’s grant portfolio.

The Foundation’s earlier commitment to Jewish teens, notably the 19 million dollars awarded to support Jewish camping, is beginning to take effect. More than 400 campers have applied for the JWest initiative at the time of this posting. We anticipate up to 1,000 teens will be enrolled by summer. Here, too, we have developed a theory of change and logic model to guide the initiative’s implementation (which you can view through the link—Jwest Theory of Change developed by Brandeis University’s Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies).

For the Specialty Camp Incubator being developed by the Foundation for Jewish Camp (FJC) that JJF funded, ten applications are in process. FJC reports it could receive as many as ten additional applications. When the four specialty camps open, we project a couple thousand Jewish youth each summer will be immersed in specialized skill development integrated with a Jewish camp experience.

The entrepreneurs who lead the specialty camp development will surely identify the staff they assemble as being fundamental to their camp’s ultimate success. Similarly, JJF believes that day school and youth group educators are pivotal to school students and youth group participants’ experience. JJF is committed to supporting substantive programs of professional development for Jewish educators (See "Lessons From Mapping Jewish Education," field research mapping research JJF commissioned Brandeis University’s Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies to complete).

JJF grants awarded previously in support of professional development included a grant for an alumni program for 65 Pardes educators as well as funding for BBYO’s 15 Professional Development Initiative (PDI) youth group advisors. This cohort of 15 individuals will begin their PDI program this summer with intensive study at both Hebrew College and Indiana University’s Kelly School of Business.

This past Board meeting marked my two year anniversary as the founding Executive Director of JJF. In this time period, JJF has awarded 80 million dollars of grants and paid out 17 million dollars on its commitments. We are encouraged by early indicators of modest successes and are ineffably grateful for the opportunity Jim Joseph, z’’l, has afforded us.

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