In the past two years, Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies shuttered both its eponymous leadership development fellowship and its ROI Community for young Jewish “change-makers.” For two decades, these initiatives have produced many leaders of Jewish organizations and movements not only in the United States and Israel but around the world.

Schusterman is one of several philanthropic heavyweights to close or shift leadership initiatives, followed by the soon-to-shutter Dorot Foundation, which runs a 10-month professional fellowship in Israel, and the Wexner Foundation, which told alumni last week that it is spinning off its flagship leadership programs into an independent nonprofit.

“There’s a change happening that no one is discussing,” Rebecca “Becky” Voorwinde, CEO of The Bronfman Fellowship, told eJewishPhilanthropy. Philanthropist-funded leadership fellowships “have mostly fallen out of favor in the last few years, at the same time as younger people are expressing views that don’t match the standard thinking of prior generations. And, I think there’s a correlation between this generational attitude to institutions and the overall demise of these programs as ‘pet projects’ of specific philanthropists.”

Voorwinde spoke with eJP about philanthropists welcoming new perspectives, viewing leadership initiatives as a communal benefit and grappling with generational divides. 

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Jay Deitcher: How can an organization hope to invest in a leadership pipeline while recognizing this new generation might want to do things differently or see things differently, especially related to Israel and the breakdown of Jewish denominations?

Rebecca Voorwinde: The best leadership programs in the Jewish community over time have been programs that take the long view and recognize the value of investing in young people without assuming that you’re putting something into the slot and it’s coming out the way you want it exactly.

The leadership programs that the Jewish community has been built on for the past 40 years are programs that understood leadership education as a deep process of working with people on the character level, on the interpersonal level, giving them space to grow their point of view, giving them space to try on different directions for their leadership, introducing role models [and] introducing great Jewish learning.

If one expects that those young people are going to reflect back the views of a different generation, you’re not going to see that. You’re going to see change and evolution as young people take in the realities of their time and also metabolize the tools and resources and ideas and texts that have been the anchor for the Jewish people for a really long time.

If you have the patience as an organization or as a funder to take the long view, you will be pleasantly surprised working with young people and seeing them turn into individuals who can imagine solutions for the future that we couldn’t imagine today. But if what you’re doing is investing in a person and you want the [return on investment] to be a replication of a set of values or views exactly verbatim of the current norms or standards, that’s not really leadership work, that’s ideological think tank work. There’s certainly a place for that in the Jewish community, but that’s not the same thing as cultivating character or cultivating Jewish leadership.

JD: What does our community lose when we don’t have these leadership programs?

RV: We are at risk right now of being hyper-focused on responding to crisis after crisis and being reactive as a community. When we invest in young people, when we give space for young people to imagine the future that they’d like to co-create, what we get is a more enriching and more exciting and more inspiring Jewish future and more joyful Jewish future.

You look at some of the institutions that have been created over the past 20, 30 years, projects like Sefaria or Keshet or some of the writers and artists that have emerged, within our community — we have Daniel Handler, who’s Lemony Snicket, or [journalist] Matti Friedman or [nonfiction author] Judy Batalion, I could go on and on. You see creativity emerge because these individuals were given space to incubate their sense of where they belong and who they are.

Another thing that is really important is the cross-pollination that happens when investing in pluralistic projects. When you have young people who are leaders coming from a wide spectrum of backgrounds, identities and career paths, and you build community for those folks that’s durable across difference, it helps to break down silos within the Jewish community, denominational silos and ideological silos, but it also breaks down the silos of Jewish professionals only working with Jewish professionals.

One of the things that’s really unique about a lot of the projects that have existed for a long time but that are shifting right now [is that] these fellowships weren’t exclusively for Jewish professionals. Often, they were either pre-professional in the sense that it was somebody who was high school age, like the Bronfman Fellowship, or college age, like Dorot or the Schusterman ROI program, which was often people who were entrepreneurial, but that wasn’t always their day job.

JD: Every organization has a line set on Zionism, but right now, people are defining the word Zionism very differently from one another. People aren’t necessarily speaking the same language. How can an organization balance guiding this new generation and trusting them?

RV: I’m a true card-carrying member as a pluralist, and I deeply believe in the importance of pluralism now more than ever, and I’m very lucky to work for an organization that centers pluralism as a deep and true value.

At its best, pluralism is where people can respect and value one another and recognize that we are living in a shared reality and that we need to find shared collaborative ways towards a better future for all, not just towards a better future for some.

When there are significant ideological differences on major topics that are painful even, one of the things you do is you help people figure out how to build relationships that are durable enough that they can hear each other’s realities, ask each other to understand better one another’s views and stories and perspectives, and care about each other. That then allows for a much larger container where you can absolutely talk about definitions of Zionism, or definitions of whatever it might be, but it’s within the context of those relationships. 

Many young people have anxiety and concern that Jewish institutions want something from them, and I would like to say, “Yes, Jewish institutions do want something from them, but maybe something different than they think.” I would like them to feel that Jewish institutions want them to bring their full, authentic selves into community with one another, and a lot can emerge from there.

What they’re feeling is that they’re being asked to sign on to a set of ideas without room to bring themselves in, and what can happen is that you have people who either check out completely or create alternative, siloed institutions, which are competing with one another.

There’ll always be some competition in Jewish life, and we have that since the beginning of our tradition, but hopefully we’re still looking towards finding a shared we.

JD: I was recently at the Jewish Funders Network conference, and in the opening plenary, one of the speakers said to the audience, ‘If you are in this room, you are establishment.” How can an organization show young Jews that they can truly come as they are and truly bring their ideas, no matter how off the derech?

RV: A lot of that requires highly skilled educators, not just in the sense of being the kinds of individuals that have Jewish text knowledge or historical knowledge, but also people with high [emotional intelligence] who have a sense of how to build a group, how to build a space that models warmth, openness and creativity.

JD: How has the fellowship changed in your 18 years working for Bronfman, especially as the way America relates to Israel has changed and how Israel is taught has changed?

RV: The fellowship started in 1987, so we’re entering the 40th year. For the past 13 years, we’ve continued to receive support as a not-for-profit from the Samuel Bronfman Foundation, and we also have grown our fundraising from the wider Jewish community.

Thinking about generational change, Edgar [Bronfman’s] son, Adam Bronfman, really stepped up as that next generation leader and said, “I believe in this project that my dad started, but I also want this project to be able to be seen as a talent bank for the Jewish community more broadly.” 

In the last five years, we went from raising a little over $100,000 from our community in 2021 to raising over $1 million from our community in 2025.

We run a fellowship for North American high school students and a fellowship for Israeli high school students. In the last few years, we’ve built out almost four weeks of content for the North American students that takes place in America [unlike in the past when we had them only learn in Israel] because if we’re really serious about being a Jewish identity program for both Israelis and North Americans, then we need to give North American Jews space to think about what shapes them in their home environment and what their sense of responsibility is to the place in which they live, in addition to what their relationship to Israel is and what their relationship to Jewish peoplehood is and what their relationship to Jewish texts and ideas and spirituality.

Another significant shift for us has been integrating more active arts experiences and engaging with working artists. You can gain a lot of inspiration as a Jewish person through the arts today, and unfortunately, there isn’t a lot of support for Jewish artists right now.

Another example is when I first started working at Bronfman 18 years ago, we didn’t spend even one minute with Palestinians when the group would be in Israel. Today, we have a pretty robust approach to how we integrate Palestinian perspectives into the time that this group is in Israel. Proportionally, it’s still a very small part of the program, but it enables the group to grapple with the diversity of Palestinian experiences and with these serious challenges that Israel is facing when it comes to creating a shared future and shared society.

JD: Can you tell me about your increase in fundraising and what you’ve learned?

RV: The benefit of these in-depth leadership programs that have a long arc to them [is that] they were mostly created by individual funders, and it’s time for the whole Jewish community to grow up a little and recognize that these have been some of the most important engines for creativity and leadership in the Jewish community for the past 40 years. They don’t just belong to one funder. They are an asset for the whole Jewish community.