In 2018, in the midst of the “#MeToo” and “#Time’sUp” movements, the Jewish Women’s Foundation of New York, now Elluminate, hosted an event that provided space for Jewish professionals to share their experiences with workplace gender abuse and sexual harassment. There was a glut of stories, said Sara Shapiro-Plevan, CEO of The Gender Equity in Hiring Project, but not yet a concrete plan to change the landscape. 

“The stories that we were hearing, there was no plan to address these through policy, through process, and through any kind of forward-looking change,” Shapiro-Plevan told eJewishPhilanthropy. 

So Shapiro-Plevan, along with two partners, launched the Gender Equity in Hiring Project — an initiative to target gender bias in employment processes in Jewish organizational life. Originally designed to be a decade-long project, GEiHP will be shuttering its doors early, with its work wrapping up at the end of June 2025. According to Shapiro-Plevan, the decision to close became clear over a year ago as the fiscally sponsored project struggled to find funding to continue their work. 

“The shift in funding priorities from supporting Jewish organizations across the board to the radical focus on Israel-Gaza and global antisemitism after Oct. 7, really means that other funding priorities are going by the wayside,” Shapiro-Plevan told eJP. “The funding for work in the space of gender equity has dried up.”

By June, the project will have trained 250 Gender Equity Advocates across 210 Jewish organizations in its 18 cohorts. GEiHP is also recruiting 15-20 people from within its network to serve as “SUPERAdvocates,” who will receive additional training throughout the summer of 2025 to support the continuation of the project’s work within the Jewish organizational landscape by serving as coaches and consultants. 

According to Rachel Gildiner, executive director of SRE Network, one of GEiHP’s funders, the project’s absence will be felt throughout Jewish organizational ecosystem. 

“The work GEiHP has accomplished has been invaluable to the field, from creating an open salaries spreadsheet, to coaching Jewish women to become self-advocates,” she told eJP. “We are deeply grateful to Sara for championing this work forward, for lifting up women’s voices, and for modeling what feminist leadership looks like. We are confident the work of GEiHP will live on through the resources they have created, advocates trained, and partnerships formed, including with SRE.” 

Following its closure, the project will leave behind its newly designed website to ensure its resources remain available. The site will hold a number of projects, including bibliographies, its Gender Equity at Work Blog and its “Open Salary Spreadsheet,” which continues to affect salary negotiations and transparency expectations in the Jewish world. Despite GEiHP’s closure, the spreadsheet and blog will continue to be updated.

GEiHP spent a number of months attempting to pursue a merger or acquisition upon realizing their funding sources had thinned, but no logical partner arose, according to Shapiro Plevan. She cited “structural weakness” in the Jewish nonprofit space, specifically in the domain of gender and the innovation sector, as a contributing factor. “There were no natural opportunities for us,” she said. 

Shawn Landres, a co-founder of Jumpstart, the Jewish nonprofit “thinkubator” that announced its own wind-down this month, provided guidance to the project as it was getting off the ground. Landres hopes that shifts in funding priorities in response to Oct. 7 don’t undercut domestic goals within the Jewish nonprofit ecosystem. 

“GEiHP’s mission remains urgent, perhaps even more so in the current national context. Creative, focused investment in the long-term health of the Jewish organizational ecosystem is vital,” Landres told eJP. “I worry that post-Oct. 7 funding shifts, no matter how valid the reasons, may put other critical priorities like these at risk.”

Despite GEiHP closing down, layoffs will be limited. Though the project involved the labor of a number of paid consultants and volunteers, Shapiro-Plevan was the only full-time paid employee. This makes it somewhat less complicated for the organization to close its doors but was also a contributor to its challenges, she noted. 

“This is a tiny organization, and very small organizations are hard to support,” Shapiro-Plevan told eJP. “They’re lonely places to work, and it is of tremendous value for the Jewish community to think about how we support them.”