Over a decade ago, the Jim Joseph Foundation convened more than a dozen local and national funders of Jewish teen programming for a series of discussions on expanding teen involvement in Jewish life. We recognized that adolescents are a critical demographic and adolescence is a moment of inflection. Moreover, teens are holders of great insights and have the ability to articulate them and the realities they hope those insights can create. To paraphrase Joel 3:1, while those of us around the table had dreams, we knew it would be teens holding the vision to move us forward. We felt and continue to believe that teens are the futurists and optimists that our world needs.

These early conversations, which included teens themselves, taught us a lot — namely, how much more we still needed to learn. As a result, we commissioned groundbreaking research to identify and unpack strategies from both the non-Jewish and Jewish worlds are most effective in educating and engaging teens. This research ultimately gave us the knowledge to design responsive local teen initiatives in 10 communities across the country, under the banner of the Jewish Teen Education & Engagement Funder Collaborative. United by the shared aspiration of creating and nurturing contemporary approaches to Jewish teen education, engagement and growth, this new network of national and local funders and practitioners worked side by side with teens. Together, they reimagined the youth-serving ecosystem in these communities of varying sizes and demographic composition, with a commitment to sharing whatever unvarnished lessons they would learn.

Courtesy/Jewish Teen Education and Engagement Funder Collaborative

Fast forward to today and the teen-serving ecosystem in the communities looks vastly different than when the Funder Collaborative started. New programs were incubated and unconventional partnerships took root. Scaling the most successful ideas was baked into the Funder Collaborative’s DNA; impactful programs launched in one community were adapted by others or brought to a national audience via the Funder Collaborative itself. In this way, the impact of the best ideas was amplified to reach hundreds and sometimes thousands of teens. This evolution was always the vision.

Now powered by Jewish Federations of North America (JFNA), the Funder Collaborative created an environment that fosters risk-taking, experimentation and ongoing reflection. Since becoming nested at JFNA, the Collaborative has offered six scaling masterclasses where Jewish professionals from more than 70 organizations learned about best practices and strategies for scaling, many with innovations successfully scaling across the country.

As the foundation’s grants to these communities conclude, we are eager to advance this work in different ways. While our local partners on the ground continue to cultivate important relationships with an eye on sustainability, we want to share learnings for the benefit of the field at large. In this vein, we are excited to share “From Kedem to Kadimah: 10 Lessons from 10 years of the Jewish Teen Education & Engagement Funder Collaborative”. Authored primarily by Sara Allen, executive director of the Funder Collaborative, and Rabbi Dena Shaffer, the Funder Collaborative’s director of education and learning, the lessons cover areas including how to hold space for both innovation and proven models; how best to collaborate and engage different audiences; the importance of mission clarity and leadership development; and how to build initiatives and programs designed to be sustainable; among others.  

The 10 lessons

1. Rally stakeholders with a meaningful vision
Local initiatives mirrored the national approach by investing first in local research or a comprehensive planning process, often with senior staff retaining strategists or consultants to survey the landscape and identify gaps and opportunities. Buy-in at the top ensured an ambitious new initiative was prioritized.

2. Invest — teen education and engagement is worth it
The Funder Collaborative measured what was long suspected but only observed: even minimal engagement makes a positive difference. Now we know there is a strong correlation between teens’ connection to Jewish values and the influence those values have on the lives teens choose to lead. Substantive Jewish content creates a sense of belonging, a desire to do good in the world, and a platform for teens to build friendships.

3. Ask “How will this last” early, often and together
Stakeholders were engaged throughout the process so that local funding partners, often Federations, designed initiatives that reflected the community’s actual needs and wants. Communities held conversations with program providers at the beginning stages and throughout the grant period about expectations around sustainability — so that teens would be elevated as a priority of the community long after the initial grant concluded.

4. Leaders and visionaries collectively bring ideas to life
In a dynamic landscape, effective leadership plays a pivotal role in driving success. Key aspects of the communities’ journeys were tied to several intertwined factors: the credibility of a prestigious anchor funder and supportive benefits of a relational grantmaking approach, the stabilizing force of network leadership, representative shared leadership models, and involved lay stakeholders.

5. Evaluate and amplify the voices of those you serve
From teen advisory boards, consulting roles, content generators (via blogs, vlogs, social media, and websites) to community connectors and peer-to-peer engagers, teens hold a central role and voice in each initiative. This created a sense of ownership and empowered authentic discovery for both their own Jewish experiences and that of their less engaged peers.

6. Go alone to go fast, go together to go far
It is often said that collaboration moves at the speed of trust. To that end, the governance of the Funder Collaborative charted the course. The role of its Operating Committee (a rotating group community and foundation voices) was to explicitly provide leadership, strategy, and vision; implicitly, it was to model and cultivate and foster open communications.

7. Create demand by infusing new energy and varied marketing
Each community has embraced innovation, adaptability, and the spirit of community-building. At their core, they are drivers of culture change. This is a role that requires lead professionals to seamlessly move across a daunting set of responsibilities, and in some ways no role is more challenging than helping to garner awareness for new offerings and attract teens to meaningful new opportunities.

8. Prioritize a competent and representative youth-serving workforce
A youth professional can be a teen’s “person,” a non-parental trusted adult, and provide a safe space to wrestle with the challenges of adolescence and for their spiritual journey. To best support youth professionals, communities aim to understand how their needs are being met, from compensation to equitable hiring, onboarding, training, supervision, mentorship, and career-planning. 

9. Stay responsive, stay flexible, stay the course
While any long-term endeavor requires the necessary time for meaningful work to unfold, an extended timeline presents its own challenges. Balancing the long arc of projects with the need for flexibility remains an ongoing challenge. Many of the communities point to the best-kept secret to success: a strategic pivot.

10. Apply these lessons widely
The insights herein hold the power to revolutionize how we approach education and engagement. The principles of transparency, adaptability, and data-informed decision-making, which have been instrumental in our journey with teens, are universally applicable.

Stories of learning and engagement come to life

The stories captured in Kedem to Kadimah are ones of deep, productive, and sometimes challenging “R&D” in the teen-serving ecosystem. We are forever indebted to Sara and Dena, their team, and the dedicated professionals in each Funder Collaborative community around the country. Their unwavering commitment to experimentation and iteration led to new frontiers: new models of engagement, the elevation of youth-serving professionals, and renewed prioritization of this inspiring and diverse generation of young people. We also gathered learnings, insights, and data every step of the way thanks to the steadfast work of Rosov Consulting and Informing Change. Their cross-community evaluation in particular enabled the Funder Collaborative and the foundation to understand the effectiveness and outcomes of the initiatives in their entirety, not just as individual initiatives in each community.

In fact, specifically because of the unique cross-country local/national funder design and because of the robustness of this national network and its impact, there is much to learn from the Funder Collaborative’s story. Initiatives that grew directly out of the Funder Collaborative such as BeWell, a JFNA initiative to address the growing youth mental health crisis, and national professional development initiatives and research helped to advance Jewish education and engagement across the country. In particular, the Teen Jewish Learning & Engagement Scales (TJLES) were developed in collaboration with The Jewish Education Project as a set of measures to assess progress toward the outcomes and Jewish impact on teens. Like other Funder Collaborative projects, the TJLES started out as minor projects and were scaled effectively — a model for other programs now too. Our foundation also deepened its learning about funding collaboratives and how this approach can amplify philanthropic work in local communities and serve as an important vehicle to share learnings and grow networks.

Most important, however, is the impact of this work on tens of thousands of Jewish teens and their families. This has always been the story we’re most interested in, and it feels as urgent now as it was in 2013. Teens face immense challenges navigating today’s world, and meaningful Jewish community and learning experiences can support them in finding connection, meaning, and purpose now and into the future. Anyone who works in a multigenerational community can ill afford to ignore this demographic, tokenize them or treat them as “lesser than.” Rather, our community (and others) should listen to and embrace teens, should empower them to lead and create meaningful experiences—not because it’s good for the teens (although it certainly is) but because it’s good for the community.

We are humbled to see and share the impact of our partnership and learning over the past 10 years. As we look back, we also look forward with hope for what can be, over the next decade and beyond. With the Collaborative now at JFNA, there is vast potential for greater reach and deeper engagement of teens, their families, and professionals anywhere in the country. Yet that will only happen with a sustained commitment from the field. We hope you are inspired by this work, and the outcomes already achieved, to help ensure that meaningful teen education and engagement continues unabated for generations to come. 

Rachel Shamash Schneider is a program officer at the Jim Joseph Foundation.

Aaron Saxe is a program director at the Jim Joseph Foundation. 

Josh Miller is a chief program officer at the Jim Joseph Foundation.