Jewish Women INVEST Launches to Mobilize Women towards Values-Aligned Impact Investing
Jewish Women INVEST | A Project of Invest for Better launched to mobilize women to activate their money towards values-aligned impact investing. Jewish Women INVEST is an educational and community-building initiative developed at the intersection of Jewish values and impact investing.
“We identified a need to blend impact investing education with Jewish values specifically designed for women,” says Samantha Anderson, Co-Founder & Facilitator of the program. “To address that need, we created Jewish Women INVEST, the first educational investing network for Jewish women, to inspire confidence, demystify impact investing, and unleash investment capital for positive change.”
“Our goal is to create, build, and educate a network of Jewish women that intentionally invests in ideas, businesses and organizations that support women, that are led by women, and that foster cultures that hold values of equity and equality,” explains Robyn Polansky Morrison, Co-Founder & Facilitator.
The program was developed through an extraordinary partnership with Invest for Better, a campaign aimed to mobilize women to invest responsibly and purposefully. “The launch of Jewish Women INVEST | A Project of Invest for Better, is an exciting win-win for all of us – for Invest for Better, as we scale to reach thousands of women worldwide; for Jewish Women INVEST who can build on our curriculum to provide something purpose-built for their unique audience; and for the world, which will have more educated and activated impact investors,” said Ellen Remmer, Senior Partner, The Philanthropic Initiative and Champion, Invest for Better.
The Jewish Women INVEST curriculum will be delivered during monthly sessions over the course of six months. Members can expect three components in each session; (1) impact investing content taught by Jewish women who are experts in their fields, including Erika Karp, Founder and CEO of Cornerstone Capital Inc, and Vanessa Bartram, Founder and CEO of Zora Ventures; (2) Jewish values-learning delivered by Rabbi Mary Zamore, Executive Director of the Women’s Rabbinic Network and author of The Sacred Exchange: Creative a Jewish Money Ethic; and (3) time to network and share ideas.
As Beth Sirull, President and Chief Executive Officer of the Jewish Community Foundation of San Diego says about the development of Jewish Women INVEST, “Women control 40% of all investable assets in the US, and that percentage is growing. Our Jewish tradition calls on us – through nearly 100 commandments in the Torah and much Talmudic discussion – to steward our assets responsibly, not just for greater financial gain.”
Thanks to the generous support of the Max M. & Marjorie S. Fisher Foundation, the program cost is $360 per Circle member. Jewish Women INVEST welcomes applications for the first National Circle that will launch on November 16th, 2020, with members from across the United States. The application deadline for the National Circle is October 28th 2020. A second Circle will launch in January 2021 recruiting women from the Detroit, Michigan area.
The longer-term goal of the initiative is to create a more formal investment group for Circle graduates through the creation of an investment platform to drive more Jewish women to deploy capital for change. The group will seek to simplify some of the complexities of impact investing as well as provide access to more investment opportunities and deal flow.
For additional details on Jewish Women INVEST, email info@jewishwomeninvest.org and to apply, visit www.jewishwomeninvest.org