In 2006, Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies held its first ROI conference in Israel.

In the mid-aughts, it was “a revolutionary act to bring together 120 Jews from all over the world,” Shawn Landres, an ROIer and the co-founder of Jumpstart Labs, told eJewishPhilanthropy. “And not to pursue a specific policy agenda.”

The program, he said, gathered Jewish young Jewish “changemakers” and allowed them to follow their passions, sensing that innovation would flower from their convening. “There are plenty of networks that are focused on fighting antisemitism, hasbara, particular political perspectives, arts and culture, social justice; there were fewer in the early 2000s, but they existed. ROI brought together 120 of what they thought of as the best and brightest.”

Since that first meeting nearly 20 years ago, Schusterman Family Philanthropies has invested in over 1,700 innovators — activists, social entrepreneurs and other early-career Jewish professionals — gathering them for yearly summits and offering microgrants to fund their projects, with the expectation that there would be a substantial “Return on Investment,” or ROI. Today, ROIers are leaders across the Jewish world, in organizations big and small, and in the wider world as well.

One of the core aspects of the program was that it cast a web across the world, connecting Jewish leaders from the hubs of North America and Israel, where 85% of Jews worldwide live, with leaders in countries that do not have the vast philanthropic infrastructure or financial means of the former two, such as throughout Africa, Asia, Latin America and Europe.

After Schusterman announced last month that it would shutter ROI on July 1, 2026, to focus more on grant making, after one final summit next spring, many ROIers worry that there will be less support for innovators outside of the U.S. and Israel, but say that the effects and network ROI built will continue to be felt for years to come.  

“The very notion of ROI was catalytic for encouraging Jewish innovation in Europe, and for encouraging a continent that was emerging from trauma and that was still navigating a fairly conservative post-World War II reality to really invest in Jewish culture, identity and expression, and to trust the rising generations that were rethinking it and reimagining it,” said Landres, who has long focused on innovation in the Jewish world.

After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Landres and other ROIers assembled to provide humanitarian aid to civilians and help them evacuate the country. After the Oct. 7 terror attacks, the team pivoted to aid Israel.

In Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America, there is only so much money available, Landres said, and it’s often tied to religious life or combating antisemitism. Small ROI microgrants of $1,000 and $5,000 allowed ROIers to fund their passions, curate art shows, concerts and plays that never would have existed without Schusterman’s support.

Schusterman Family Philanthropies insists that while ROI is ending, its support for world Jewry is not. “We remain very committed to global Jewish communities and global Jewish peoplehood,” Lisa Eisen, co-president of Schusterman Family Philanthropies, told eJP last week, pointing to grantees that are not specific to any country, including Hillel International, BBYO, Birthright, the American Joint Distribution Committee and Moishe House.

“What we thought the beauty of ROI was [that] once an ROI, always an ROIer,” Michal Ben-Dov, vice president of strategic partnerships at the Taub Center for Social Policy Studies in Israel, told eJP. “It’s a lifetime thing.”

Ben-Dov said she did notice signs that changes were happening with ROI at Schusterman. In March 2024, ROIers received an email stating that “senior ROIers” who joined the community more than 10 years prior were no longer eligible for microgrants. She and her ROI friends joked about it. “We’re seniors,” they quipped. “We need special services.” She now sees it as a signal of what was coming. She expected they might hold fewer summits or reformat the program, but “I didn’t see it coming that they would close it down,” she said.

ROI was “the most practical form of Jewish Peoplehood that I have experienced,” Ben-Dov said. “And I’ve been to camp.”

The Jewish world is in “desperate need of Jewish leadership,” she said, so it’s concerning to think about where leaders will come from in the future. Schusterman chose the best in the community and empowered them, which pushed others in the community, too. 

This will continue, she said, because even though Schusterman birthed the community, it often acted on its own. ROIers formed WhatsApp groups, held local meet-ups, came up with their own ideas, and launched their own innovations, without direct support from ROI.

Canadian-raised actor Jamie Elman, an ROIer who co-created the Yiddish comedy web series “YidLife Crisis” with Eli Batalion, who is also an ROIer, first connected to Schusterman in 2014 when he and his creative partner were invited to “Jews, Jokes, Jerusalem: Comedy for a Change,” a conference organized by Schusterman that was led by ROIers.

“We were trying to do something in our little niche world of Yiddish Canadian comedy,” he said, but he looked around at the conference, which was held soon after their first season dropped, and saw actress and activist Noa Tishby, the mayor of Jerusalem and the executive producer of “The Daily Show.”

“What are we doing here?” he asked. He was shocked to have his work validated, to have people see his art as “valuable beyond just comedy.” He too believed humor could spark change. That year, he was invited to join ROI.

“I don’t know that we would have done a quote, unquote, second season [of “YidLife Crisis”] if it weren’t for ROI,” he said. The show was supposed to be a “summer fling,” but after “going to do the [ROI] summit, we were totally emboldened to make more episodes and to go after people like Mayim Bialik and Howie Mandel [who appeared on later seasons] and say, ‘Yes, we’re Jewish comedians from Montreal, but we’re not just doing schtick.”

Since then, ROI microgrants have supported him and Batalion on comedy tours, and ROIers helped them secure gigs around the world. ROIers promoted their shows and filled their audiences. Because the ROI community grew based on referrals, he was able to recommend other Canadians to join the global community.

Aviva Klompas also got the push she needed from ROI. The former director of speechwriting for Israel’s Permanent Mission to the United Nations and the former president of Israel and global Jewish citizenship at Combined Jewish Philanthropies, Boston’s Jewish federation, was burning out when she was asked to join ROI in 2019.

“I was just very frustrated and a little bit lost and ready to give up on working in the Jewish world,” she said. “If you had said to me five years ago, six years ago, that you’ll co-found an organization, I would have told you that that’s crazy. That is certainly not in the cards.”

ROI was “a game changer for me,” Klompas said. “Both in professional development, but also finding a community of people that were the farthest from fearful or risk averse. Who are energetic, ambitious, creative. They have very big ideas, and they go for it, throwing caution to the wind. In ROI, I found my tribe.”

Klompas had no idea how to create and build a nonprofit, but ROIers helped guide her, and today she runs Boundless Israel, a nonprofit that works to revitalize Israel education.

ROI will continue to impact the world, she said. “They seeded a generation of people who are going to continue to shape the field in their own right. As I look out at the newer, younger organizations, like the OneTables, the Repair the Worlds, the Boundlesses. Those are all from the Schuster-verse, either ROI or the fellowship program.”

ROI is seeing its return on investment, said Diego Goldman. He joined ROI from what he called “the deep Diaspora,” he told eJP. “Living in Argentina, even when Argentina is the seventh largest Jewish community in the world, you feel isolated.”

He founded LAZOS in 2014, an organization that connects young Latin American Jews that is funded by Schusterman Family Philanthropies. ROI has allowed Latin American Jews from small communities, such as in Peru, Paraguay and Colombia, where the Jewish population is a few hundred or few thousand Jews, to connect with innovators from the larger world, share ideas and grow their projects in ways that would have taken “20 more years,” without ROI.

“We all say that we live in a very globalized world, and it’s a very connected world, and blah, blah, blah,” he said. “The reality is that we are not so connected if you don’t have these kinds of networks or communities that put interesting or smart people together to create.”

Without ROI, “the world would be a different place,” Elad Caplan, an ROIer who is CEO at Ne’emanei Torah Va’Avodah-Kolech, told eJP. “Every single monumental change [that] has happened in Israeli society to do good in the world, if you dig a bit under the surface, you’ll find more ROIers who are doing wonderful work, so I think that will live on well after the program is closed.”

Although he worries about the future of the Jewish world and the world at large, “I worry less about the future knowing that so many wonderful people have been through this community,” he said.

If there is a gap, someone will fill it, Caplan said. There will be new leadership programs to fill the space ROI left behind, and hopefully they learn from the program’s lessons. 

“It’s important to empower both people and projects” he said. “One thing that ROI identified was that if you invest in good people, then they’re going to do wonderful things.”

One of the main gifts ROI gave the Jewish world is believing in the vision of young Jews across the diaspora, Landres said. 

“Lynn Schusterman and Sandy Cardin and Lisa Eisen and Yoni Gordis, the people who were really there at the beginning, did something very, very hard,” he said. “They convened these young Jews from all over the world without really knowing what was going to come from the convening, just knowing that good things were going to come. And that level of trust is so rare and such a gift.”