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You are here: Home / Jewish Philanthropy / Jewish Grantmakers: The Futurists of Our Time

Jewish Grantmakers:
The Futurists of Our Time

February 13, 2019 By eJP

By Rabbi Andy Kastner

A number of years ago I experienced a personal and professional inflection point. After years of dreaming and working towards becoming a rabbi, it became clear to me that my rabbinic vision was going to take on an un-traditional shape. Building a rabbinate in the field of philanthropy and strategic grantmaking presented an interesting platform to leverage skills I had acquired and serve the community. However, there were gaps in my skills that I needed to fill.

I needed a program or playbook for learning the craft of grantmaking and, further, Jewish grantmaking. Through professional development opportunities and independent learning, I developed the more traditional competencies that befit an effective grantmaker. Still, I was on my own in finding a framework to shape myself as a Jewish grantmaker.

The creation of a cohesive curriculum will further develop and professionalize the field of Jewish grantmaking. We will create a living document and a disciplined guide to philanthropic investment and community development. It will assert a Jewish point of view and serve as a roadmap to train emerging practitioners.

Here I offer a scaffolding with a focus on Jewish wisdom with the hope of leading towards a codified Jewish grantmaking curriculum.

I have organized this into two sections:

  • A thumbnail of the more obvious, general areas of content mastery that support good grantmaking

and

  • A sketch of some of the less obvious (and, truthfully, more interesting!) areas of skill and content mastery that define Jewish grantmaking

General Grantmaking Curriculum:

  • Nonprofit governance, organizational structure and culture
  • Grant writing and fundraising
  • Financial acumen (reading and understanding budgets, statements of financial position, 990’s, etc.)
  • Strategies of Collective Impact
  • Content Expertise
  • Data Driven Evaluation

Jewish Grantmaking Curriculum:

Jewish Polity

Grantmakers must know not only the organization(s) they support, but also the broader context or ecosystem in which these organizations are a part. Jewish polity is community mapping. It’s a perspective that provides clarity of the way in which the organized Jewish community is constructed and works. Through this type of mapping, we better understand the historical, political and cultural forces that shape the Jewish corporate world, and the values that guide their work. From here, a grantmaker can better assess the power lines and fault lines of a community system, and see the forces that shape organizational values.

Think of Daniel Elazar’s seminal work Community and Polity: The Organizational Dynamics of the Jewish Community as a model of this learning.

Relational Engagement

Relational engagement is a theory of being that draws upon psychology and Jewish wisdom. The theory enables a practitioner to maximize the range and depth of human connection. As a participant in the pilot cohort of M² Relational Engagement Circle, I have been immersed in this theory and practice – it has transformed the way in which I encounter and navigate relationships. Grantmaking is deeply relational work. It requires an attunement to one’s character, the interplay of self and other, and effective management of thirdness.

Three main concepts create the frame:

  • Character – a knowledge of ones’ self – the internal characteristics that make someone who they are and inform how they interface with the world. Grantmakers must know themselves to be themselves – and must be themselves to bring themselves.
  • Self–Other – the interaction between two people. This is an aspect of connection that captures the way in which two people interact – at its best, the self and other are dancing, providing real-time mirroring or a relational feedback loop. This leads to a co-construction of learning and meaning – a mutuality.
  • Thirdness – the socio-cultural outer forces that impact a relationship such as titles, gender, or power. Grantmakers must be aware of their thirdness and those that inhabit their various relationships. Through this awareness, grantmakers can better hold, name or navigate aspects of a relationship that can be awkward or inhibit trust building.

Fluency of relational engagement practices, a grantmaker can more effectively exercise deep presence and broad cultural competency.

Talmud Study – Now stay with me here…

Grantmaking presents a striking similarity to the practice of Talmud study.

When you read any given sugiyah (discrete section) of the Talmud, immersed in the give and take of an argument, the reader is struck by the most common occurrence at the end of virtually every sugiyah. That is, that there is often no conclusion – no clear path or prescription that tells the reader, “and now you should do this,” “this is the halakha.” This is where the work really begins.

The reader/grantmaker must be a dot connector, listening with presence, weaving together a cohesive narrative that leads to a course of action. The practice then for the reader, and so too for the grantmaker, is to be a present listener of the text – the person – the context in which one finds themselves. The unique voice of the text, or grantee must be heard and understood on its own terms. Then the reader/grantmaker must have the fortitude to act – to say, I have done the work to assess the situation. While there is, or may be no guaranteed way forward, we must set a path ahead. While this may not be the path, and I am open to course correcting, this is how we will proceed.

Long Range Thinking

Long Range Thinking (sometimes discussed along with futurism) is a discipline of the social sciences, drawing upon historical, social and cultural trends that move us to envision the future.

The Long Now Foundation, founded by the activist and renegade thinker Stewart Brand (remember The Whole Earth Catalog?), is an organization that seeks to foster long-range thinking. In a talk about Super Forecasting in 2015, Philip Tetlock, professor at the Wharton School and the School of Arts and Sciences, discussed:

“What can we learn from long-range thinking?” He notes, “The right analogy is not Nostradamus and prophecy. The right analogy is optometry. The increasing clarity with which you can see the Snellen eye chart when you are fitted with some better glasses.”

Long range thinking pushes us to bring into focus what lies beyond the horizon. This is a type of problem solving and community development that looks generationally, in succession.

One way of bringing this theory into focus is to look at generational patterns. The 14th century Islamic Scholar Ibn Khaldun, put forth a cyclical theory of history that plays out in four revolving generations. In his latest masterpiece, The Laws of Human Nature, Robert Greene synthesizes these four generational patterns.

~ “The first generation is that of the revolutionaries who make a radical break with the past, establishing new values but also creating some chaos in the struggle to do so.”
~ “Then along comes a second generation that craves some order – they want to stabilize the world, establish some conventions and dogma.”
~ “The third generation, having little direct connection to the founders of the revolution – feel less passionate about it. They are pragmatists. They are not so interested in ideas but rather in building things.”
~ “Along comes the fourth generation, which feels that society has lost its vitality, but they are not sure what should replace it. They begin to question the values they have inherited, some becoming quite cynical.” (Greene plots us here now)

In a world in which people appear to be thinking in the shorter and shorter term, while the rate of cultural change occurs faster and faster, grantmakers must endeavor to extend the time horizon of their thinking. In the mode of long range thinking, we seek to envision a world that does not yet exist, perhaps a generation (or more) hence, and set in place the building blocks to make it manifest.

And this is a Jewish way of thinking. In his final address, in June 2013, before stepping down from more than two decades in office, Chief Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, affirmed that Judaism is lived in “Future Tense.”

“It [Judaism] is the only civilization whose golden age, the messianic age, is yet to come. As a result, Jews look forward more than they look back.”

When Moses meets God in the burning bush, Moses asks God what name he should call God. God replies enigmatically, in a phrase, unique to Tanakh:

Ehyeh asher Ehyeh

A common (mis)translation can be found, ‘I am: that is who I am,’ or ‘I am the One who is.’ This is a grammatical error. The phrase means, literally, ‘I will be what I will be.’ As Rabbi Sacks puts it, “God’s name belongs to the future tense. His call is to that which is not yet. If we fail to understand this, we will miss the very thing that makes Judaism unique.” In the pursuit of imitatio Dei, of striving to embody God’s characteristics, we as human beings, as Jews, and as grantmakers, are called upon to move toward and envision the future.

The enterprise of the Jewish people has existed for at least 3,000 years. What would it look like for grantmakers to invest in generational time?

Grantmakers, Narrators of the Future

Grantmakers serve as the narrators and advocates of community need and opportunity, stitching together the people and resources that move community and culture closer towards the vision of justice. To do this, we must be pathfinders and we need a curriculum to help guide our work and shape our vision of the future, now.

Rabbi Andy Kastner is the Interim Executive Director at the Jewish Federation of the East Bay.

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Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Liz Fisher says

    February 13, 2019 at 2:15 pm

    Thanks for this thoughtful piece, Rabbi Kastner. At Amplifier, we agree that all of us have the ability and responsibility to become thoughtful and strategic givers. We invite readers to check out our resources at https://www.amplifiergiving.org/resources/ and look forward to sharing your curriculum as it emerges.

  2. arnie draiman says

    February 13, 2019 at 6:25 pm

    thank you rabeynu andy –

    amazingly thorough work.

    are you familiar with danny siegel’s notion of mitzvah heroes? here is some basic info: http://dannysiegel.com/HowToPrepareYourselftoBeAMitzvahHero.pdf

    danny created an entire tzedakah enterprise based on mitzvah heroes – much of which fits into to several of your categories above. of note is that some of the categories carry more weight than others. in particular, danny continues to preach (and i am a chassid of his!) that the efficiency and effectiveness of the organization is of utmost importance when deciding where to make a grant.

    happy to discuss this further.

    arnie draiman
    http://www.draimanconsulting.com

  3. Chip Edelsberg says

    February 13, 2019 at 6:35 pm

    Here we go, again. Rabbi Andy Kastner adds his unique voice to a chorus of those deeply committed to (and enjoying the extraordinary privileges of) Jewish philanthropy who advocate to “further develop and professionalize the field of Jewsh grantmaking.”

    Rabbi Kastner’s piece I think is particularly thoughtful. It is both descriptive in what is needed–a program or playbook–and prescriptive in proposing a conceptually-oriented framework for a specific curriculum of study.

    Kastner goes further than most who opine on the topic in identifying discrete categories of Character, Self-Other, and Thirdness as frameworks for curriculum development. Extant literature which speaks to the Kasnter categories is abundant: on moral education and emotional intelligence, for example, when it comes to Character; perhaps most notably the writings of Martin Buber on Self-Other; and a raft of contemporary anthologies on social stratification which offer penetrating, often disturbing insights on what Kastner calls “Thirdness” in society based on one’s gender, race, class, and inheritance.

    Kastner also identifies six areas for a general grantmaking curriculum. He points to diverse texts, e.g., Elazar’s Community and Polity and the Talmud, as sources of a possibly singular nature in the illuminating content they offer the Jewish grantmaker. Kastner’s proposal is both theoretical and practical.

    Looking back at knowledge about effective philanthropy which has been created in the last 30+ years brings into focus contributions made by the Center for Effective Philanthropy, Council on Foundations, Foundation Strategy Group, Grantmakers for Effective Philanthropy, Guidestar, Independent Sector, the Leap of Reason’s Performance Imperative–among many more organizations and networks. A veritable library of books on foundation and private philanthropy has been published during these decades, historically rich and empirically instructive in nature. The point is that sources for curriculum development are well established; they await use.

    Kastner astutely invokes Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks as a spokesperson for Jewish grantmakers playing a constructive futurist role in ongoing renewal of Jewish community. In the general community, it bears noting that an emerging body of trenchant critique of philanthropy in Anand Giridharadas’s Winners Take All, David Callahan’s The Givers, Robert Reich’s Just Giving, and Edgar Villaneuva’s DeColonizing Wealth warns us of an ominous future for civil society, should we fail to take corrective action. Temple University scholar Dr. Lila Corwin Berma, in essays not dissimilar to theses propounded by Giridharadas et al., raises serious questions about the current state of Jewish philanthropy, elevating an essentially aristocratic Jewish elite to positions of power and influence to the detriment of the well-being of the Jewish body politik. In a way, the future is already here, and it begs for the attention of Jewish grantmakers.

    I am hopeful Rabbi Kastner’s conceptually-grounded approach to the Jewish philanthropy he practices today is a harbinger of the future of grantmaking. I only wish that Jewish community organizations and foundations with the power to accelerate this future would responsibly resolve to do so.

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