Good Monday morning!

Jewish climate groups are celebrating the $370 billion slated to address climate change in the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, which cleared the House on Friday. The legislation came as somewhat of a surprise to activists after a strenuous saga of negotiation in the Senate, where the IRA was long-stymied by Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV).

Phil Aroneanu, chief strategy officer for Dayenu: A Jewish Call to Climate Action, gave credit for the legislation’s passage to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY). Schumer “continued to negotiate with Sen. Manchin when a lot of people said, ‘it’s time to pull the plug,’” he told eJewishPhilanthropy. “But Sen. Schumer has really done an incredible job of moving the ball forward here, and we’re proud to have supported him in that effort.”

Schumer participated in a Dayenu rally for climate action last year. The climate funding in the IRA is the largest investment the U.S. has ever made in climate initiatives, and uses tax incentives to support clean energy sources like wind and solar. The legislation is estimated to cut the country’s greenhouse gas emissions 40% by 2030.

Some of the funding in the bill is already planned to reach the Jewish community, as Hazon: The Jewish Lab for Sustainability will soon launch an initiative to help Jewish institutions cut greenhouse gas emissions and be more climate conscious. A combination of private funding and grants through the IRA will support the effort.

“The opportunities opened by the Inflation Reduction Act are going to [contribute to] the vision that we had for supporting organizations and taking this seriously,” said Liore Milgrom-Gartner, deputy climate action director at Hazon. “It’s just going to facilitate it, speed it up and offer it up at the scale that we need to be seeing.”

Both Hazon and Dayenu see the climate funding as a victory, but not the be-all and end-all of the U.S. climate response. Hazon will continue to support its Jewish Youth Climate Movement, an activist group led by middle and high schoolers, to lobby politicians. Dayenu is already looking to the 2022 midterm elections, with a goal of engaging nearly half a million eligible voters to encourage them to cast a ballot. 

And Dayenu is now taking aim at pressuring the secular and Jewish investment worlds on climate action with its All Our Might initiative. “Urging banks and asset managers, the BlackRocks and Vanguards of the world…to move their money away from fossil fuels and towards clean energy,” Aroneanu said. “We’re also working really closely with Jewish institutions to align their own investments with Jewish values.”

Aroneanu and Milgrom-Gartner emphasized that Jewish climate activists are inspired by Jewish history to keep working toward action on climate change, even when progress looks impossible – such as when it seemed like the IRA would die in the Senate.

“We have fought, we have struggled, we have been the underdogs,” Milgrom-Gartner said. “We keep hope alive…we see where we want to go and what can be done. And we get there…sometimes it takes generations, sometimes it takes hundreds of years.”

SLOW BUT STEADY

Impacting investing goes more mainstream as ESG strategies change

iStock

Impact investing has moved from the fringe into the mainstream for both the broader financial industry and Jewish asset management, particularly for donor-advised funds. The change is driven by donor interest in an evolved form of impact investing, as the focus shifts from ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) screens to local loan programs and shareholder advocacy, reports Lev Gringauz for eJewishPhilanthropy.

Slow adoption: “We have a very small minority of donors who are like, ‘Never in a million years,’” said Beth Sirull, CEO of the Jewish Community Foundation, San Diego. “And then there’s just a lot of people who are interested, they want to learn more. Slowly but surely we keep talking about it. We have seen an uptick in some of our constituent agencies for whom we manage custodial funds….to [have] their money invested with Jewish values in mind.”

New tools: Impact investments are often in the form of recyclable loans. For example, the Jewish Vocational Service in Boston is part of a Massachusetts Pay for Success program, where donors can invest in service providers and have their investment repaid by the state. The Combined Jewish Philanthropies, the city’s federation, offered the opportunity to invest in the initiative — also known as a social impact bond — to its donor-advised funds, and has helped the JVS expand services to roughly 2,000 immigrants.

Read the full story here.

THE JEWISH COMMUNAL ENTERPRISE

Once upon a community: Where did it go and how do we reclaim it?

Tinnakorn Jorruang

“Community has been understood as a sacred organizing concept in Jewish thought and practice. The centrality of community has served as a binding and essential value for the Jewish people. However, the unraveling of community is not merely a Jewish phenomenon but rather represents a generic civic trend among Western democracies,” writes Steven Windmueller, interim director of the Zelikow School of Jewish Nonprofit Management, in an opinion piece for eJewishPhilanthropy.

What does it all mean? “How then do we understand the role and place of community in a changing American society? Why are we seeing a decline in community and civic engagement? What does all of this mean for Jewish life, as well?”

An open and competitive market space: “As the community transitions, the idea of a holistic, integrated communal model has given way to [a] new constellation of distributed power. The traditional organizing principles are being challenged and, in some instances, discarded. The concept of membership, the idea of affiliation and loyalty to denomination, among other organizing tools, are giving way to a more open and competitive market space. Emergent boutique models are being introduced, framed around alternative organizing principles and delivery models.”

Looking forward: “In the decades ahead, the imprint of entrepreneurial leadership, creative visioning and nimble funding strategies will define the Jewish public square.”

Read the full piece here.

Worthy Reads

Teaching the Teachers: In Religion News Service, Yonat Shimron looks at efforts by the The Olga Lengyel Institute for Holocaust Studies and Human Rights (TOLI) to educate teachers whose curricula include lessons on the Holocaust. “??TOLI’s director, Deborah Lauter, a lawyer who until recently led New York City’s Office for the Prevention of Hate Crimes, said Holocaust education is often perfunctory — a series of facts or a memoir of an individual writer. ‘In ninth grade world history, my teacher put up a picture of Hitler on a screen and turned and pointed at me, and said, “Deborah, you’re a Jew. Tell the class about the Holocaust.”’ TOLI doesn’t offer its own Holocaust curriculum, but rather guides teachers toward resources, strategies, materials and ideas for use in their own classrooms. It calls its method ‘inquiry-based learning’ intended to get students to raise questions and think critically on their own.” [RNS]

Pic of the Day

SAMUEL NEUFELD/ISRAEL-ASIA CENTER

At an event in Jakarta, Indonesia, sponsored by the Jerusalem-based Israel-Asia Center, an Israeli delegation of investors, tech professionals and trade officials meet with local Indonesian business leaders, university presidents, entrepreneurs and investors. The group traveled to Indonesia — the world’s most populous Muslim-majority country — to learn about its potential for connections with Israel through investment, startup ventures and social impact initiatives.