Building a Better Normal

In response to Aaron Katler’s recent post in eJewish Philanthropy, entitled Building a ‘Better Normal’ for the Jewish Community, who could disagree with a vision for the future that has collaboration, big picture thinking, and innovation at its core? The challenge as we at Chai Mitzvah see it, having worked more or less on our own to get the attention of major Jewish organizations for the past 10 years, is that although Chai Mitzvah has engaged over 8,000 people in “growing their Judaism” over a wide spectrum of the Jewish community, impacting individuals, organizations, and communities, it is still a constant struggle to be heard, counted , and embraced by those who have a “microphone ” to the larger community.

We still do not have a good “pipeline” to learn about and support those of us (and there are quite a number of “mezzanine ” organizations that are at no longer start-ups, and have a proven and mature track record) to have a seat at the table. Now that large conferences where we have had booths for many years and often had the opportunity to host a workshop  may not be in the cards, we desperately need a way to educate and advertise our work throughout the Jewish community.

We have been left on our own to promote ourselves, since we have not been one of the chosen ones embraced by national organizations that promote small programs and catapult them onto the national scene. You may say that this is a free market and those ideas that are good get promoted. In my experience, that is not necessarily the whole story. There is a skill to getting grants, there is the feeling  that the Jewish funding world has been focused on next gen programming and outreach to unaffiliated, and there is the reality that there are many more programs that are not “picked” for support because there is a limited amount of money and other resources that programs like Upstart, Slingshot, Covenant grants, etc, have. If we are serious about innovation and collaboration, we need to think seriously how we support and promote  programs more broadly, especially those at the mezzanine stage of development that have a proven track record of success. 

This article was written by Audrey Lichter, who is the Executive Director of Chai Mitzvah.

 

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