The Bronfman Fellowships Alumni Venture Fund (AVF) – a peer-to-peer giving fund supported by donations from the Bronfman alumni community – has announced the Winter 2014 Alumni Venture Fund Grantees. The AVF gives grants to innovative, creative, impactful alumni led projects that are in the spirit of the Fellowships’ core values. The Alumni Advisory Board, made up of 22 alumni ranging in age from 22-44, makes all grant decisions based on group deliberation and close discussion with applicants. The AVF has distributed almost 150 grants, and Bronfman Fellowships alumni throughout the country and the world are making meaningful change in their communities as a result. To find out more about the grantmaking process and grantee work, please watch their 2013 Alumni Venture Fund Annual Report.

The 21 Winter 2013 grantees are:

Social Responsibility

Ariela Rothstein – Encuentros Community School (Queens, NY)
Kassandra Loewen – Huron’s Born This Way Campaign (London, Ontario)
Jaime Korman – Home 2 Home (Palo Alto, CA)
Irit Feingold – Journey to Ethiopia (Israel), Encouraging Ethiopian Israelis to explore their roots – through a trip back to “the Old Country”
Yulia Forshil – The Other (Israel)
Shira Engel – cOMmunity Yoga School (New York), Imagining a new kind of yoga training, committed to social justice

Jewish Learning

Josh Foer – Sefaria (California), Revolutionizing Jewish learning through an online library of sacred Jewish texts
Jess Radin – Beginning and Belonging: Transnational Adoption in the Jewish Commmunity (NYC)
Hannah Kapnik Ashar – Come & Listen (Denver, CO)
Alixandra Kriegsman – Between the Lines: A Documentary (NYC), Challenging paradigms of Israel education in a documentary film
Maya Rosen – Netzitzot (Princeton, NJ), Distributing Jewish innovation, in the form of specially made women’s Tzitzit
Yair Agmon – The Scribbled Chumash (Israel)
Uri Sefarai – Daroma: Beit Midrash (Israel)

Arts & Culture

Andy Neiman – ACCORDING TO JOE Workshop (Chicago, IL), Debuting a uniquely Jewish play – about Joseph of Nazareth
Noa Silver – “An American Tale” Play Reading (Berkeley, CA)
Eli Battalion – Yidlife Crisis (Montreal, Quebec), Making a film about a midlife crisis – in Yiddish
Ellie Gettinger – Jewish Museum of Milwaukee “After Hours” (Milwaukee, WI), Bringing young Jews into a Midwestern Jewish museum – where the average member is 65 years old
Ari Allen – Washington University Jewish Film Festival (St. Louis, MO)
Lior Zalmonson – Memory and Forgetting: A Print Screen Conference (Israel)

About: The Bronfman Fellowships is a vibrant network of 1,000 young Jews from Israel and North America that includes some of today’s most inspiring Jewish writers, thinkers and leaders. The Fellowships, founded by philanthropist Edgar M. Bronfman in 1987, taps future influencers at a formative point in their lives, before college, and immerses them in an intensive exploration of Jewish text study, pluralism and social responsibility.