Milestoned Musings from Rachel Brodie, E.D. of Jewish Milestones:

I'm into tzedakah. Giving it.  Getting it. Instilling it. Inspiring it.
So I'm always on the lookout for the "click" moments in the narratives of those who spend money to make the world a better place: What gets people to give?

This morning, skimming the alumni magazine of the college I attended, I found a two-for-one story: "A Lesson in Generosity: A Philanthropy Class that Hands out Real Money to Real People," which describes a sociology course and its benefactor, Marty Granoff.  The class sounds a lot like the reality show version of a the evergreen Jewish youth group activity about allocations and parallels the emergence of a teen philanthropy movement.

What's the point of the class? Granoff is quoted as saying, "I guess you could say my goal was to create a new generation of philanthropists.... I do a lot of fund-raising myself, and I've found that sometimes even what I call terminally wealthy people begrudge giving their money away. They give as if it were their last penny. I wish people could get more enjoyment out of giving." Asked why he gets such pleasure out of giving, Granoff jokes that it would take years of psychoanalysis to answer that question. "I remember being very poor as a child, and I had a tin box that I put pennies in for a Jewish charity," he says. "Putting those pennies in the box always gave me a thrill."

Bottom Line = "It takes money to make money," may be a truth of the business world and the bane of many a start-up not-for-profit (like Jewish Milestones) but my Marty Granoff take-away is, "It takes giving to make givers." Instilling the value of tzedakah—among rich or poor, with people of all ages, using Monopoly money, real pennies or hefty checks—seems a worthwhile investment of time, tzedakah and even tuition dollars.

Some Resources:
For more info on the Teen Philanthropy Movement: TeenPhilanthropy Movement.
To get involved nationally: Jphilanthropy.com and locally (Bay Area): Jewish Community Teen Foundation.

A personal favorite among the many allocations exercises: Doing Good Well developed by Jenni Mangel.

        

Maya Bernstein wrote about Jewish Milestones 2.0 in ejewishphilanthropy.com, here's an excerpt:

Embracing The Maybe: The Case For Risk-Taking | eJewishphilanthropy.com
By Maya Bernstein
**Note this piece reappeared on 3/23/10 in The Jewish Week (NY)

"Jewish Milestones, which provides the Bay Area with educational resources to support all Jews seeking accessible and meaningful lifecycle rituals, is currently undergoing a “Refresh” stage, analogous to hitting a Refresh button on a Web browser, which enables the page to pause and reload. Though they have proven their concept, and their programs are in high demand, they are rethinking and restructuring their staff and programmatic offerings due to the current economic climate and the financial struggles it has caused them. UpStart, which incubated Jewish Milestones from 2005-2008,has been grappling with how to deal with the reality that one of its star projects, often-highlighted as an example of success in the field,is experiencing deep growing pains.

"Bikkurim, which has incubated 26 new Jewish initiatives in the past10 years, five of whom no longer exist, and about a dozen of whom are,in one way or another, struggling, has long been thinking about this issue. “This is part of the risk tolerance we have for start-ups,” says Nina Bruder, Bikkurim’s executive director. “

"Some succeed, some fail, and some struggle, and that is the name of the game. If we play it too safe, then many of the most exciting new ideas to hit the Jewish community can’t take root. We think that if every group we take in succeeds, then we as an incubator are actually failing the community – it would mean that we haven’t taken enough risk ourselves. We are risk-mitigators, not risk-eliminators.”

"Uncertainty, and bumps in the road, are core to the realm of innovation,and, I believe, not only innovation. Such is the nature of investing your heart, soul, and precious financial resources in someone else, and allowing for the unknown to take its course. We should applaud our social entrepreneurs for their wisdom and tenacity, and, especially for their ability to step back when it is necessary, recognize their new realities, and adapt to the changes those realities have imposed. For the Jewish community, exhibiting patience and extending support during these “Refresh” moments, will mean that, no matter the short-term pattern, we will ultimately continue to grow, and remain relevant and vibrant"

Rachel Brodie responds: Amen.

Read the full article

        

Article Alert:

The new issue of the journal Contact focuses on new Jewish ritual. Some good reading inside, including the piece co-authored by Jewish Milestones Executive Director, Rachel Brodie and Felicia Herman, E.D. of the Natan Fund. 

Check it out: http://steinhardtfoundation.org/journal.html

        

Tziziyot (strands/threads/fringes that represent critical concepts and obligations, tied together and then attached to oneself, to keep the ideas in mind)....Here's a strand from Sean Stannard-Stockton's blog entry, The Nonprofit Institutional Imperative:

"Nonprofits, even large ones, rarely have enough money. Even when their revenue is high, they frequently do not have the philanthropic equity on their balance sheet that would give them the ability to invest in the future. When an organization, or an organism, is in survival mode, it must shut down nonessential functions. It must operate so as to preserve itself. In the case of a nonprofit, this means focusing on fundraising and executing existing programs....

"But great organizations are led by teams who refuse to succumb to the Institutional Imperative. They recognize that the organization they lead is not itself an entity to preserve so much as a vehicle for delivering value to shareholders and stakeholders. The gifted executive is one who realizes that they have been entrusted with stewarding this value creating vehicle. They have been given the responsibility of maximizing the value that their organization creates,not simply tending to the care and feeding of the organization."

        

Milestoned Musings from Rachel Brodie, E.D. of Jewish Milestones: 
Maybe it comes from a growing up in NYC during the heyday of department store-based retail, but I associate mezzanines with poor lighting,polyester and the mild anxiety about getting out of an elevator between floors that was well-documented in Being John Malkovitch. 

This impression has been confirmed over the last 18 months as Jewish Milestones has edged closer and closer to needing "mezzanine level"funding.  This means that while we've proven our concept, we have yet to prove financially stable just as our "seed funding" is running out.  As part of a new and ever expanding crop of start-ups in the “Jewish innovation sector” Jewish Milestones has not yet had the opportunity to build a reserve fund or cultivate major donors over a period of years. Making budget largely on the “sweat equity” of the founders for the first four years,Jewish Milestones has been dependent on significant grant funding on a year-to-year basis.  While our current financial challenges might have been inevitable, the recession and increased competition among the many start-ups for communal dollars has us stepping onto the mezzanine level before the doors to the "philanthropic department store" have officially opened.

We have noted several articles appearing in the mainstream Jewish press over the past six months citing this problem in the innovation sector, including one from Martin Kaminer, Chair of Bikkurim: An Incubator of New Jewish Ideas. Kaminer's interest and commitment to "second stage" organizations in need of "mezzanine level" funding offers significant hope for organizations like ours.  Read it and see what you think and then let's meet on the ground floor for a discussion over in "notions."

The Idea
Last month, every day, for all 28 days, a new idea of how to  "transform the Jewish future" was issued through "a partnership that included six very different media outlets, with six different readerships, along with a major Jewish organization have partnered to create a platform to share some of the best ideas that we have heard from our own segments of the Jewish world." These included:  JTA & The Fundermentalist, the Forward and its Sisterhood Blog, eJewish Philanthropy, Jewcy, Jewschool, the Jewish Federations of North America and 31 Days, 31 Ideas,a project of Daniel Sieradski."

The Impetus
ITOW:  "It seems that the Jewish world at the moment is in the midst of something of a mass brainstorming session. As the recession rains down upon us, many of us have taken to heart the notion that necessity breeds opportunity, and instead of running for cover, many have hunkered down and given serious thought to how we can rethink the way the Jewish community works. It is a reason for optimism that despite some money woes, we all aren’t all ready to pack it in. But all this thinking presents a unique problem. While each of us in our own little corners of the Jewish world thinks about how the Jewish world could be a better place, we run the risk of recreating the silos that we spent the better part of the past decade trying to tear down."

The Relevance
Like every anthological endeavor, the offerings are a mixed bag but some of the ideas that resonated with us at Jewish Milestones including Idea #5 posted by Martin Kaminer, Chair of Bikkurim: An Incubator for New Jewish Ideas, excerpted below (or read the full post).

Idea #5: The Idea Accelerator Model: from Seeding to Scaling

We’re at an inflection point in contemporary Jewish history.  Inside the Beltway, the Bubble, the Echo Chamber, innovation and social entrepreneurship are in full swing.  Programs to support Jewish non-profit startups are proliferating to general delight and acclaim…. The best of the initiatives, projects, organizations and entrepreneurs that have flowered over the past decade have not even begun to fulfill their potential.  Our big idea is to help the best of these groups get from here to there – from local and regional success to national and international prominence.  We want to help them take their places at the table as equals with organizations that have been around for a century or more.

At Bikkurim: An Incubator for New Jewish Ideas, a program housed at and supported by the Jewish Federations of North America, we’ve spent the last ten years improving our ability to nurture young startups – taking them in at the cusp of real growth, when they’ve had some traction, perhaps have received some funding, and may just be bringing on paid staff….Our goal is to produce sustainable organizations and we’ve wrestled with the problem of what sustainability means in a world that experiences as many gyrations as ours has.  Our solution has been to extend the length of incubation from an initial two years to now closer to five with a robust program of alumni support.  We could keep extending but feel we’ve reached the limit of our current approach and that a new mission needs a new structure.

So we’re planning for the most significant change to our program since inception.  We hope to work with groups the size of those we currently graduate to help them scale sustainably by an accelerated process, producing organizations with greater reach across the worldwide Jewish population and into the funding community…. As was the situation with incubators ten years ago, accelerators are not a new phenomenon but have yet to be adapted successfully to the Jewish world. Elsewhere in the non-profit world, the Ashoka Accelerator for Social Entrepreneurship and the Skoll Awards for Social Entrepreneurship are both programs focused on ‘scale and sustainability’ for emerging nonprofits at the“mezzanine level.”  We’ll be studying those as well as many others….

It is our hope that just as we’ve watched entrepreneurship and innovation move from Yenemsvelt to center stage over the last ten years, ten years hence our community will have a system in place not just to launch new ideas but also to bring them to scale and secure their sustainability….   (Click here to read the full post)

For the full monty: www.28days28ideas.com.

        

Rachel Brodie writes:  Maya Bernstein's take on Purim, and the timing of such a powerful essay appearing in my in-box (via the noteworthy e-Jewish Philanthropy newsletter) during our own tumultuous times in the "Jewish innovation sector," seems fortuitous... then again, that might just be the "persistent, unshakable optimism" thing we have going.

Maya Bernstein wrote: "The field of Jewish innovation, like the holiday of Purim, may appear celebratory and joyous on its surface. It marks the possibility of renewal, which, in the Jewish community, ultimately means survival.But, like Purim, there are cold depths beneath this surface. There is something profoundly threatening about the field. New Jewish ideas and institutions often, and sometimes by definition, threaten traditional modes of operating and thinking in the Jewish world. In creating something new, Jewish social entrepreneurs sometimes destroy the old.In painting a new portrait of our community, they sometimes eradicate the faces and images that have defined us over time."

"This Purim, perhaps our challenge as a community is to approach this field of innovation, this realm of “venahafoch hu,”with the same simultaneously tremulous and unwavering joy we bring into the month of Adar. Light writes: “social entrepreneurs are driven by a persistent, almost unshakable optimism.” This attitude of hope in the face of potential adversity is a very Jewish notion, one of which we are reminded during the month of Adar. When we face the spinning world,the possibility of unending turmoil and the potential destruction of all that we hold dear, we are reminded to approach it with joy and hope, with an eye towards redemption and possibility, with merry-making and feasting. With a celebration of our innovators, and the belief that, ultimately, when the book ends, we will have survived,flourished, thrived, and come out stronger for all the motion."

Read the entire essay: http://ejewishphilanthropy.com/venahafoch-hu-the-force-of-creative-destruction

        

What is Jewish Milestones 2.0? Check out our FAQs for a quick look at the changes in store over the next few months.

Why start this blog?

All web browsers have a REFRESH button. One click, a brief pause, and the page you’re viewing is updated to reflect changes made on the server side.

Jewish Milestones is hitting the REFRESH button. To keep us all on the same page during this transition to Jewish Milestones 2.0, we've started this blog as part of an effort to keep you updated and to get your feedback, ideas, suggestions, opinions.... So you're welcome to jump right in, the water is warm.