In a bid to bolster Hillel International’s professional and student leaders at a fraught moment on college campuses, the Marcus Foundation announced a three-year, $27 million investment, the organization exclusively told eJewishPhilanthropy on Thursday. It is the third in a series of large gifts made by the foundation over the past decade aimed at improving employee retention at Hillel, which supports nearly 200,000 students on 850 campuses. 

“Bernie recognized a long time ago that we needed to support campus life because it was going to be and is very difficult today,” Jay Kaiman, the president and director of the Marcus Foundation, told eJewishPhilanthropy, referring to the foundation’s founder, Home Depot co-founder Bernie Marcus. “He was talking about it way before it became what the realities are today, so this is a continuation of him looking at the landscape, making a decision that Hillel played a key role in that landscape and we needed to do everything we could to make these [Hillel] buildings come to life and be strong for the students and also to give them a safe haven.”

The grant comes as Hillel has come under scrutiny from both sides of the political spectrum, and as Jewish students are flocking to colleges in the South and Southwest that are considered friendlier environments than campuses in the Northeast and West Coast, where antisemitism and anti-Zionism is sharper-edged. 

In 2008, the Marcus Foundation donated $3 million to build The Marcus Hillel Center at Emory University in Atlanta. After that, Kaiman said, the organization made “a very intentional decision not to fund infrastructure and buildings, but to fund people.”

One of Marcus’ main passions was for investing in the folks in the “orange aprons” — the associates working the floor at Home Depot stores.

In 2016, the foundation gifted Hillel International with a five-year, $38 million grant for talent development, followed by a 2021 five-year, $38 million grant to continue the work. This latest investment continues what is a “transformational relationship with the foundation,” Adam Lehman, president and CEO of Hillel International, told eJP.

When the foundation made the first gift, its leaders had the belief that Hillel International’s “turnover rate was not acceptable,” Kaiman said. At the time, the organization’s annual employee retention rate was 50%. “Even though we built buildings, buildings aren’t worth anything if you don’t have good people in those buildings.”

The original grant led to the creation of a new role focused on supporting talent at individual chapters and of numerous initiatives, including Hillel U, the organization’s yearlong training program, a yearly New Professionals Institute and talent grants that support Hillels financially to attract top talent, especially in places that may “not even be in a particularly desirable geographic location,” Lehman said.

In the first five years after the initiatives launched, Hillel’s annual employee retention rate soared to 90%. In 2016, leadership hiring from the internal pipeline was 30%. Today it’s 75%.

The greater retention level is occurring at a time when Hillel is growing substantially, but also after years of heightened antisemitism. A 2025 American Jewish Committee report showed that more students were experiencing antisemitism on campus than ever before. In the past year, students and Hillel staff have been harassed and had their property vandalized. Meanwhile, over the past decade, the number of students engaging with Hillel programs doubled from 93,000 to 192,000.

Because of this antisemitism, Jewish students are choosing different schools from a decade ago. Between 2023 and 2025, the number of Jewish students at Harvard, Columbia, Cornell and the University of Pennsylvania decreased by 3-5%. According to the AJC report, for 80% of parents, antisemitism was a deciding factor in choosing where their children study.

“Jewish students and their families are voting with their feet in terms of seeking out new environments, and so this grant will enable us to develop professionally staffed Hillels in schools like Clemson [in South Carolina], Auburn [in Alabama] and James Madison University [in Virginia], so that Jewish students who are choosing to attend these schools, primarily in the Southeast and Southwest, can have amazing Jewish experiences,” Lehman said.

The new Marcus Foundation grant will nurture 78,000 new leaders who support students so they can walk their campuses with Jewish pride, even amidst antisemitism, Lehman said. “We’re going to use this grant to supercharge our student leadership development programs, so that we can catalyze the largest ever new generation of Jewish builders, creators and leaders, using the funds from this grant to invest in new student fellowships, new student convenings, including our first-ever 1,000-plus student leadership convening taking place in February of [2027].”

It brings Kaiman joy to invest in Marcus’ passions. Their friendship spanned three decades, until Marcus died in November 2024. “He worked very hard for his money and we get the honor to direct it to things that were important to him,” he said.

This gift comes at a time when Hillel has come under fire for leaning too progressive for some in the Jewish community and for being too conservative for others. 

Kaiman said he hopes that the grant sends the message that “Hillel is important to the Jewish ecosystem, and that our support for them represents our trust in them. Number two, our hope is that this reinforces to the professional teams at Hillel that they’re important to the Jewish community, and we don’t take them for granted…Three, we actually hope that some of these people that we’re investing in not only stay at Hillel but go on and work in other aspects of the Jewish community, because I think Hillel is a great pipeline for other organizations.”