Lynn Schusterman doesn’t enter a room — she receives it. At the final ROI Summit, the room came to her — reunion after reunion, a warm embrace, a familiar face, 20 years of relationships gathered in Jerusalem one last time.

Two decades and 1,700 participants later, across more than 60 countries, ROI will close on July 1. Before the lights dim on the program synonymous with the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies and its impact on global Jewish leadership, some 300 ROIers from across its many eras and continents gathered one last time in Jerusalem. The summit kicked off last night and will run through Wednesday.

Last October, the foundation announced the sunsetting of ROI, with Lisa Eisen, Schusterman’s co-president, saying in a statement: “Twenty years is as good a time as any to celebrate what we’ve accomplished.” The closure marks the completion of Schusterman’s shift to becoming an exclusively grantmaking institution. In 2024, the foundation wound down the Schusterman Fellowship entirely and handed off its Reality program, which takes emerging leaders to Israel, to iTrek to operate, where it continues with Schusterman’s funding. With ROI now closing, the foundation will now focus on its grantmaking, with the hope that the leaders and organizations that it funds will carry on the work of cultivating Jewish leadership globally.

“I think it’s OK after 20 years to find a new path, but it’s going to be missed — they were a huge platform for leadership in this community, and there’s going to be a vacuum,” said Barak Sella, a senior research fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School and founder of Abraham’s Tent, which builds people-to-people connections between Americans and the Middle East and North Africa region. 

“I’m thinking especially about people in their 20s — it’s going to be a challenge to offer them a similar opportunity,” Sella, who joined the ROI Community in 2022, told eJewishPhilanthropy.  Some of his closest relationships trace back to the network, he added: “My best friends, my partners in my work — people I’ve started organizations with — are all from ROI.” 

Established in 2006, ROI is a leadership incubator built on a simple premise: people over projects. Rather than funding discrete programs, Schusterman invested in individuals — bringing cohorts of young Jewish leaders to Jerusalem each year for an immersive summit, then sustaining those relationships through grants, gatherings and a global network. By 2011, that model had a name — “Connect and Create” — and a structure that let ROIers organize their own gatherings around shared interests. 

After 20 years of ROIers, those same people came back together one last time, gathering at a hotel in southwest Jerusalem. The atmosphere was one of cathartic celebration with a pinch of nostalgia. The opening ceremony of the summit featured Israeli President Isaac Herzog; Lynn Schusterman; her daughter, Stacy Schusterman, who took over as chair of the foundation in 2018; Schusterman Co-President Lisa Eisen; and Justin Korda, ROI’s founding director. Israeli First Lady Michal Herzog was also in attendance. The Jerusalem Street Orchestra led the crowd out to the tune of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” and “Jerusalem of Gold.”

The evening opened with Beri Rozenberg and Tamar Gil Menachem, ROI’s co-directors, praising Lynn Schusterman: “You chose to trust leaders before the outcomes were totally clear.” The night’s theme, they said, was hope and new beginnings. ROI is closing, Rozenberg told the room, but the work, the relationships, and the responsibilities this community shares are not: “This may be the last ROI Summit, but the beginning of the next era of what you will accomplish, both individually and collectively.”

The ROI community members across cohorts have already begun organizing themselves. In recent months, the network has convened gatherings in Berlin — which focused on the link between rising antisemitism and democratic backsliding — and in Israel, where groups have met around a women’s social impact network and a global community connecting ROIers working in innovation, technology and international development. Online meetups, active WhatsApp groups and a new member-led platform are in the works. In Israel alone, ROIers have months of programming already on the calendar — none of it funded or organized by Schusterman. As one ROIer put it simply: “It’s up to us to keep the magic going.” 

President Herzog praised Schusterman’s philanthropic impact in Israel, calling it “practical, grounded and personal”: “Faith in people, especially young people. Your belief that leadership can come from unexpected places, that ideas matter, that initiatives matter, that one person can make a difference and change the world. ROI is one of the clearest expressions of that belief.” He concluded by calling Lynn and Stacy “titans of the Jewish People.”

The crowd welcomed Lynn with thunderous applause again, less befitting an octogenarian philanthropist and more appropriate for a rock star taking the stage.

“We know Israel can be a beacon of hope for the world, and it takes bravery and leadership to get there — and who better than the passionate, innovative young Jews who are here tonight with me,” Lynn Schusterman said in her remarks.

Paying homage to her late husband Charlie, she noted that he believed young people could accomplish anything they put their minds to. 

“Reflecting the diversity of Jewish Peoplehood, we wanted ROI to have its home and soul here in Jerusalem,” she said. “We wanted to build a network that was global and grounded. It is truly the honor of a lifetime to stand here tonight. You inspire and motivate me — and at 87, we have to keep pushing and going forward.”

Taking the stage after her mother, Stacy Schusterman highlighted the foundation’s funding priorities both in the U.S. and Israel. . “When I look out at all of you, I am so glad my mom took the calculated risk and started ROI,” she said. “ROI is about leaders, and how we work with them to turn ideals into action, helping to strengthen the Jewish people and democratic values, fighting extremism and paving the way for a more just and inclusive society.”. 

“Now is our time,” she continued, “in Israel and around the world, we must look even deeper into ourselves. We will persist, we will maintain hope. We are counting on each of you to keep going — you have the tools and the networks to lead in the Jewish community and in Israel.” 

Eisen beamed with pride at a room of hundreds of former and current ROIers who took a program and made it an institution. Speaking to the crowd over an al fresco dinner, Eisen praised Lynn directly: “Twenty years ago, you planted seeds through your leadership and your vision, and today we’re sitting among beautiful trees that have grown from those seeds you planted.”

Adam Simon, CEO of the Aviv Foundation, attended the opening evening and praised the Schusterman Foundation, saying it “always demonstrates introspection and the evolution of its investments over time.”

Speaking on the sidelines of the gathering, Shanie Reichman, Israel Policy Forum’s director of strategic initiatives and director of IPF Atid, who joined ROI in 2022, highlighted the international program’s ability to connect Jews from around the world. “ROI changed the nature of who I meet in Israel,” she told eJP “I always came here to see family and visit childhood friends who hold a very narrow worldview, and ROI opened my eyes to the different types of people in Israel. Now the main people I come to visit are my ROI community.” It was through ROI that she met her eventual collaborator, Mor Yahalom, with whom she built IPF’s Shared Values Project.

Analucia Lopezrevoredo, founder of Jewtina y Co., which spotlights Latin American and other underrepresented Jewish communities, first joined ROI in 2015 and returned to the community in 2024. She reached for a parenting metaphor to describe what comes next: “When you become a parent, you might feel like you don’t know what you’re doing. Then you realize — not only do I know what I’m doing, [but] I’m taking what I learned and making it even better, because I have this whole other layer of experience. I’m passing down something based on the same love and energy that was passed down to me.” 

Asked what the night felt like, she didn’t hesitate: “It’s a celebration of life, a celebration of a moment. It’s hard to put a lid on a container that has nourished us for 20 years. Whenever we finish a meal, we hold space for gratitude — because it takes intention to give thanks after being nourished.”

In the City of Gold, where ROI cultivated and nourished for 20 years, the program is now taking its final bow. Just as ROI’s final opening dinner concluded, the last thing the room heard, as it has at every summit before this one, was Lynn Schusterman’s voice, beaming with gratitude: “I make it possible. You make it happen.”