Is There Gender Equity in Jewish Organizations?
The U.S. election season has put the issues of diversity and gender on the national radar. Now, a new book looks at gender equity through the lens of North America’s Jewish organizations, where 70 percent of professionals are women, yet few hold top positions.
In Leveling the Playing Field: Advancing Women in Jewish Organizational Life, three experts in organizational change provide strategies and tools for those who want to champion gender equity in the workplace. This new “how-to” book draws upon best practices in leadership theory and human dynamics to tackle gender inequity, a deep-rooted problem that has been discussed for years by Jewish leaders with little being achieved.
In the book, the three authors paint a compelling picture of gender bias in North America’s Jewish organizations, and explain why more equitable environments are essential to the success of these organizations and the long-term health of the Jewish community. Then, they present comprehensive strategies for anyone (executives, staff, lay leaders, volunteers) who wants to build an action plan for change within their own organization.
“Imagine how much stronger Jewish organizations would be if women truly shared leadership with men,” said co-author Shifra Bronznick. “Until now, there have been too many platitudes about closing the leadership gap, but few resources actually devoted to serious initiatives. Leveling the Playing Field will give people the tools to move the community from rhetoric to real change.”
The book tackles the issue of gender equity with an eye toward organizational effectiveness, making its lessons appropriate for any sector: “An organization with overwhelmingly male leadership, despite a majority of female staff, is not likely to be operating as a meritocracy and therefore is not taking full advantage of its talent pool.”
However, the conversation is particularly relevant to Jewish organizations, federations, nonprofits, foundations, and religious institutions, which have been slow to address the problem: “There are fewer women at the high echelons in the Jewish communal arena than in comparable organizations in academia, philanthropy, and the secular nonprofit sector.”
Using the most current studies and data from the Jewish world, the authors explain how recent efforts to address gender equity in the workplace, while encouraging, are still largely superficial and ignore the underlying factors that perpetuate gender bias (e.g., antiquated models of workplace success, unfair policies, inflexible environments and misconceptions about women’s potential).
LEVELING THE PLAYING FIELD:
Advancing Women in Jewish Organizational Life
By Shifra Bronznick, Didi Goldenhar, and Marty Linsky
Published by:
Advancing Women Professionals and the Jewish Community
www.advancingwomen.org
in bookstores April 7th
updated: read this Op-Ed piece by the book’s authors,
Action is needed to smash glass ceiling in communal world. Click here.
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Isn’t a Dollar a Dollar?
eJewish Philanthropy is appreciative to Dr. David A. Mersky and Dr. Amy L. Sales of the Fisher-Bernstein Institute for Jewish Philanthropy and Leadership for the opportunity to post the power point of their presentation this morning.
The Abstract: The success of Jewish fundraising has an almost mythic quality yet, for better or worse, Jewish nonprofits have struggled to adjust to significant changes in Jewish philanthropy. The successful ones have grasped the Jewish philosophy that underlies charitable giving and have adapted to changes in their environment. This session will examine three factors that lend Jewish fundraising its unique set of challenges and opportunities—the values that underlie concepts of asking and giving in the Jewish world, the shifts in the Jewish communal infrastructure, and the emergence of new wealth and the new Jewish donor.
What-Makes-Jewish-Fundraising-Unique.pdf
image source: fotosearch.com
Free Corporate Grants Info
The NonProfit Times announced the launch of an online portal that gives free access to corporate donation data for fundraising research to nonprofit grant writers and others researchers.
The address is www.nptgrantsearch.com.
The research portal was launched with more than 4,300 searchable records of corporate donations valued at $1 million or more to U.S. charities.
The only free service of its kind, users can search, view and save information about the corporate donor, recipient organization, size of gift, and year of donation.
It’s already live at www.nptgrantsearch.com or from NPT’s home page, www.nptimes.com.
4 Conferences, 3 Continents
This is a busy ten days: from Oxford University to Tel Aviv; from San Diego to Jerusalem we’ve got you covered. Over this week, eJewish Philanthropy will bring you a combination of on the spot coverage, conversations, complete presentations and links. Check back often as we highlight goings on in the world of philanthropy.
For those of you with an interest in Social Entrepreneurship or Social Philanthropy, the gathering these past few days of the 5th Annual Skoll World Forum at Oxford University will be of interest.
Some background: The Skoll Foundation, was established in 1999 by eBay founder Jeff Skoll in order to promote social entrepreneurship. In 2003, the Foundation established Skoll The Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship at Oxford. As part of its aim to advance the field of social entrepreneurship, The Centre convenes the Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship, an annual conference that brings together the world’s foremost practitioners and thought leaders in the emerging field of social entrepreneurship. The Conference is pretty much like a Davos for social entrepreneurs, attended by more than 700 people from around the world.
The sessions this year were centered around the theme of Social Entrepreneurship: culture, context and social change. Some of the questions addressed by the participants:
- If social entrepreneurship is truly about “changing the world”, then what are the cultural and contextual barriers that social entrepreneurs need to overcome to create sustainable change in the areas where they work?
- To what extent does culture accelerate or inhibit change, innovation, and scale?
- How can social entrepreneurs best evaluate the contexts in which they operate?
- What are the opportunities and models of success?
- And, at the most practical level, what mindsets and tools are needed for social entrepreneurs to work successfully across different cultures and contexts?
There is a lot out there on the blog-o-sphere about the Conference. If you’re interested, I’d check out the teams from both Berkeley and the Skoll Scholars; Social Edge is the place to start.
There are also good day-by day detailed posts on Buzz, onPhilanthropy’s news and commentary blog. I also found interesting a post on social branding here.
Other news coming from the Forum included a Rockefeller Foundation announcement of a $500,000 investment in support of studying the feasibility of a social stock exchange.
Most participants are now back home and there may be more to say in the days ahead. If so, I’ll add additional links to this post.
Back in Israel, I’m attending a Tel Aviv University conference / symposium,
A new agenda for 21st century world Jewry: Tikkun Olam – mending the world;
the largest gathering of Jewish and Israeli humanitarian aid groups ever assembled in Israel. I will have several posts about this conference coming up.
In the meantime, direct from the AFP Conference in San Diego, we have exclusively for our audience the power-point of the first ever AFP session devoted to Jewish Fundraising,
What-Makes-Jewish-Fundraising-Unique; isn’t a dollar a dollar?
Learning To Give
From Ghana to Venezuela to Israel, 10 Brandeis University undergraduates have been selected to participate in social justice internships around the world this summer.
Through The Louis D. Brandeis Legacy Fund for Social Justice, established by the generosity of an anonymous donor on the occasion of Justice Brandeis’s 150th birthday, the students are provided a $3,500 stipend to alleviate costs associated with an unpaid internship in a social-service agency that addresses issues of social justice.
“There is in most…some spark of idealism, which can be fanned into a flame. It takes sometimes a divining rod to find what it is; but when found, and that means often, when disclosed to the owners, the results are often most extraordinary.” (Justice Louis D. Brandeis)
Meet the inaugural class and their projects here.
No Good Deed Goes Unpunished
“Are some charities more worthy than others? This seems to be the implication of a bill before the state Legislature that would require philanthropic foundations to document the so-called diversity of the charities they support. The inference is that the more diverse a charity’s board of directors and staff, the more worthy it is of philanthropic funding.
As a private foundation, Koret seeks to maximize our impact in achieving the philanthropic goals developed by our board of directors. We look for nonprofit partners who will produce the most positive impact in carrying out our initiatives, whether in the area of K-12 education reform, arts and culture, or strengthening organizations that serve the Jewish and general communities.”
So writes Jeffrey A. Farber, CEO of the San Francisco based Koret Foundation, in the San Francisco Chronicle concerning a bill moving through the California Legislature. Many of us know the Foundation as a funder of projects both here in Israel and the American Jewish community.
The bill, AB624, requires every private, corporate, and operating foundation with assets over $250 million to collect and publicly disclose certain ethnic, gender, and sexual orientation data pertaining to its governance, operations, and grantmaking. Such data would be required with respect to composition of the foundation’s board, its staff, its grantees, and even its vendors.
Read from from the Nonprofit Law Blog here and the complete Chronicle article here.
What Constitues Good Fundraising
Last week was the Inaugural Conference hosted by The Center for the Study of Philanthropy in Israel at Hebrew University. Dr. Leslie Lenkowsky, Director of Graduate Programs at The Center on Philanthropy (Indiana University) spoke eloquently to the (mostly) academic attendees, focusing largely on who gives, why they give and how they give. You can read about it here and here.
In today’s Jerusalem Post is a follow-up interview, “The Gain of Give and Take”, between Professor Lenkowsky and Ruthie Blum. In response to her question, what constitutes good fundraising, Professor Lenkowsky replies:
“A good fundraiser understands that his or her job is not only raising money for his own organization, but enhancing the culture of philanthropy in a community - really being an intermediary between a donor and an organization. Fundraisers ought not to think of their work as “drawing blood from a stone.”
They need to learn that a lot of people don’t realize the satisfaction they will get from giving their money to a worthy cause. The job of a good fundraiser is really to explain to a potential donor why he should give his money to a particular cause, not only because it’s good for the cause, but because it’s good for him. This is what I used to call the “mitzva theory,” because to the extent you succeed at this, you are doing a great mitzva for the donor.”
read the complete interview here
learn more about the Center for the Study of Philanthropy in Israel in our post,
Google Portal for Non-Profits Launched
Billed as a “a one-stop shop for tools to help advance your organization’s mission in a smart, cost-efficient way,” the newly launched Google for Non-Profits portal offers quick links to the most commonly used tools in the Google suite of services. It also highlights some cost-saving benefits that are available only to nonprofits.
This site features ideas and tutorials for how you can use Google tools to promote your work, raise money and operate more efficiently. And to get inspired, you’ll also find examples of innovative ways other non-profits are using these products to further their causes.
For more information check the Google blog here
On Emerging Communities
Our community is thriving.
And who you may ask is this community?
from our ‘about’ section:
To some, they represent the MTV generation; to others Millenials or Generation Y. To the UJC, they are simply NextGen. They number around 76 million Americans and will form the most technology savvy bulk of the adult population over the next twenty years. They have been inspired by the aspirations, hopes and financial freedom of their Baby Boomer parents; they are optimistic, idealistic and feel empowered. This funky young crowd, sporting their own definition of Judaism, is the harbinger of a new golden age of Jewish communal innovation.
Some are visionaries, creating programs on a shoe-string, or armed with just an idea, giving birth to exciting, fresh and cutting edge endeavors.
One, PresenTense Magazine, has just released their latest issue, On Emerging Communities. We highly recommend it; available online and in hard-copy.
from the editorial:
“Why is it that we seek community? Well, not all of us—but for the most part, we humans tend to get lonely when we’re alone. Or is it that we just have more fun with others? Either way —a denial of pain or an increase in pleasure—community has certainly been a core value for Jews across the ages, and from the number of Facebook Groups and Events invites sent a day, it seems it is a core need today as well.
As the all-volunteer staff of PresenTense brought together the voices for this issue, we were amazed by the range of issues and identities around which communities can gather. Communities can be forced into formation by the hard facts of geography, form locally due to spiritual calling, or operate across vast distances and spot encounters that grow into lasting friendships.
But more than anything else, communities tend to have a purpose. In making clear that purpose, communities provide a meaning for the life of each and every member of who joins.” Read more.
And be sure to check out “Antisocial Networking” from our regular eJP contributor ShaBot 6000.
An Embarrassed Facebook Backtracks
In an about face and under pressure, facebook has given in and allowed users in communities such as Maale Adumim and Ariel to list themselves as living in Israel and not Palestine!
According to a story just posted by Reuter’s…
“Complaints by Jewish settlers angry at Facebook for listing them as residents of “Palestine” prompted the popular social networking Web site to allow users to switch themselves back to Israel.
Facebook users living in Maale Adumim, Ariel and other large Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank protested when the site automatically listed their hometowns as being in “Palestine.” A group of settlers accused the California-based company of having a political agenda.”
continue reading here