from New Jersey Jewish News:

A lawyer and ‘quick study’ sets out to repair the world

When Repair the World’s board hired Jon Rosenberg of Montclair as its CEO 18 months ago, they tossed out the traditional idea of putting a rabbi or seasoned Jewish communal worker at the head of a Jewish not-for-profit organization.

… Repair the World, with headquarters in New York City, takes over where its predecessor, the Jewish Coalition for Service, left off. That organization, which was founded about eight years ago, said Rosenberg, was basically a clearinghouse for service projects that also marketed opportunities and did some best practices work.

The new organization has a more ambitious agenda. RTW focuses on raising the bar for Jewish service learning by offering best practices from the field, funding research on what works, providing grants to service learning programs, creating partnerships with like-minded organizations, and creating and possibly incubating new models.

Its projects include a national Jewish Service Search Engine and placing service coordinators on college campuses.

The organization’s mission is to make service a defining part of Jewish life.

Rosenberg’s goal? “Every Jewish young adult will have a normative year of service – it will be considered normal, as a gap year, summer, post-college, or semester to take a deep dive into service as a kind of rite of passage,” he said. “Jews will meet and say, ‘Where did you do your service?’”

Here’s the complete article, A lawyer and ‘quick study’ sets out to repair the world.