PresenTense and the Jewish Community Center Association have announced a new partnership through JCC Association’s Merrin Teen Professional Fellowship. The Merrin Fellowship is a selective continental training program that helps JCC professionals working directly with teens develop their own leadership and management skills, enrich their Jewish identities and those of their participants, and network and collaborate with teen professionals from JCCs across North America.

This year’s fellowship will have a special focus on social entrepreneurship, empowering professionals to create new kinds of initiatives to achieve high programmatic outcomes while promoting a culture of innovation within their institutions and movement-wide. JCC Association has engaged PresenTense as a content provider and thought partner in developing the entrepreneurship curriculum, which will include five PresenTense seminar modules and tailored mentorship for participants surrounding their projects and career development. PresenTense will provide Merrin Fellows with an entrepreneur’s toolkit, which will enable them to identify new opportunities in their organizations and develop targeted initiatives to address those needs. The tools Merrin Fellows acquire will enrich the local JCCs and camps well beyond the scope of their respective projects, inspiring professionals and participants alike to be innovators and visionaries in their approach to building Jewish community.

This partnership with the JCC Association is made possible through PresenTense’s PTSchool platform. Designed to bring PresenTense’s entrepreneurial tools and expertise to communal organizations, PTSchool is a conduit for organizations to blend the PresenTense ethos of innovation with in-house initiatives that promote “intrapreneurship” and creativity organization-wide. PTSchool equips professionals with entrepreneurial frameworks and hard skills to apply directly in their professional roles, fostering innovation from within.