The Jewish youth movement Moving Traditions has acquired the feminist teen publication jGirls+ Magazine, bringing on its executive director, Elizabeth Mandel, as the youth group’s inaugural vice president of feminist programs.

“If you knew me, you would know that is my dream title. It’s my dream job,” Mandel told eJewishPhilanthropy.

The idea for the merger, which went into effect last month, came from a conversation that she had with Moving Traditions’ CEO, Shuli Karkowsky, just over two years ago in which Mandel was complaining about how the nitty-gritty aspects of running an organization — the human resources, the finances — were preventing her from focusing as much on jGirls+’s core work, empowering Jewish female and nonbinary teens through writing, art and related leadership training programs.

Karkowsky, who said she has a “bias toward consolidation in the Jewish nonprofit world,” immediately thought she knew of a solution to Mandel’s frustrations. 

“That set off like a giant ringing bell in my head,” Karkowsky told eJP. “I think I had been CEO of Moving Traditions [for only a few months] at that time, so I just kind of filed it away until I was a little more settled. But then we met again a few months later, and I said, ‘Elizabeth, I’m gonna raise something, and if you’re offended by it, then you have to pretend I never said it, but if you’re at all interested, we should start a conversation,’ and I raised the prospect of bringing jGirls+ under the Moving Traditions umbrella, and she was really excited about it from the very beginning.”

Moving Traditions and jGirls+ are both relatively young organizations in the Jewish communal world. Moving Traditions began in 2005, and jGirls+ — originally just jGirls and focused on “self-identifying Jewish girls” — launched in 2015. As both are ideologically feminist organizations, the two collaborated closely from jGirls+’s inception. So it just made sense for the two of them to merge, according to Karkowsky.

“We are both feminist organizations running leadership programs that empower young women and LGBTQ+ teens through the lens of Jewish thought, ritual and tradition. That is a highly specific work to be doing,” she said.

Slightly over a year ago, Karkowsky brought the idea to Moving Traditions’ board, which she said was interested but wanted to know more. “Literally an entire board meeting was just, ‘Throw the hardest questions you can think of because we’re not going to move forward with this acquisition until we’ve answered all of your hardest questions,’” Karkowsky recalled.

Those questions included legal ones about Moving Traditions’ liability for the content of the magazine (if someone were to write something defamatory, for instance). “I was coming to the board saying, ‘I think we’re acquiring this incredible leadership development opportunity,’ and the board came back to me saying, ‘But, you know, we’re also getting a periodical.’ So that was part of what made it a more complicated conversation,” Karkowsky said.

The process was made somewhat easier by the fact that jGirls+ was not a 501(c)3 organization but was instead run through a fiscal sponsor, FJC. This meant that there was no need for a board of directors to approve the acquisition — though the process was still not without its bureaucratic hassles.

Eventually, however, those questions were answered, and the organization moved ahead with the move. Both organizations also informed their donors — some of whom, such as the Hadassah Foundation, funded both groups — and other stakeholders of the impending acquisition. 

Though she didn’t need the approval of a board, Mandel went through her own process of considering the acquisition. “I have a number of very close advisors with whom I consulted and who asked me some hard questions. And there are some very important funders who asked both of us some hard questions that I think were instrumental,” she said.

Mandel said that he also consulted with one of her advisors, Aliza Mazor of Upstart, who focuses on helping organizations that are going through mergers and acquisitions. “So she played a really fundamental role in knowing what questions needed to be asked that we just wouldn’t have thought about,” Mandel said

This included what happens if the acquisition doesn’t work out. “Going into a marriage, nobody wants to talk about a get [religious divorce], right? But you have to, because nobody goes into a marriage thinking it’s gonna happen, but you have to think about what if it does happen, how can I prepare for that scenario?” Mandel said. “And I think even in the course of talking about what if it doesn’t work out, we learn so much about each other, both professionally and personally, and you can’t really take away the personal part, right? Is it a personality match? Is it a cultural match?”

Both Karkowsky and Mandel described the acquisition process as being “feminist,” with a focus on collaboration and mutual benefit.

“Coming together in and of itself was a feminist act. To be able to say not ‘This is mine, and that’s yours, and I have to hold on to what’s mine and you have to hold on to what’s yours,’ but that by working collaboratively, which is such an important feminist ethic, it would be better for everyone,” Mandel said. 

“The actual negotiations felt feminist,” Karkowsky agreed. “There was no fear over, ‘If I give you power, I’ll have less power; this is a zero-sum game.’ It felt very much collaborative, and the more we work together, the pile will be bigger… which felt very, very novel in an industry that can have an attitude of scarcity.”

Mandel said she hoped that Moving Traditions’ larger participant base would allow more people to find out about jGirls+’s work.

For Moving Traditions, which also provides programming and educational materials to other Jewish institutions, the goal is that jGirls+ will bolster the organization’s direct work with Jewish teens, which Karkowsky said has been growing significantly.

“When I started at the organization, we were reaching about 5,000 teens a year, and we said within four programmatic years we were gonna double that to reach 10,000 teens, and we are three years into that four-year plan, and we are going to reach 10,000 teens this year, a year early,” she said. “This acquisition is a complement to that… this is both completely part of what we’re already doing and a part of the organization that we also really needed to grow.”

According to the two leaders, the acquisition came out of a desire for improvement for both organizations, not out of exigency.

“Part of what was magical about this particular acquisition is jGirls+ was in really strong shape. They were at an inflection point; they were actually about—about to become a designated 501(c)3 before we started this conversation,” Karkowsky said. 

Under the acquisition, in addition to Mandel joining Moving Traditions, jGirls+’s senior program manager, Bex Ehrmann, will join the youth movement with their same title. Another part-time communications staff member at jGirls+ will not move to Moving Traditions, which already has a communications team. “So unfortunately there was just no role for her,” Mandel said.

Mandel said she was “exhausted” by the work of running jGirls+ and was exhilarated by the prospect of being “able to focus on the work.” 

“I’ll be able to focus on the programming. I’ll be able to focus on the relationships I have with the teens. I’ll be able to focus on deepening and strengthening the work that we’re already doing. [This is] both because I’ll be able to give away so many of the responsibilities that I’ve had but also because I’ll be working with such a talented, thoughtful, phenomenal team of program people who are thinking about the same things,” Mandel said.