The professionals who do Jewish outreach work are on the front lines of one of the most important efforts in Jewish life today: helping Jews of all backgrounds connect more deeply to their heritage, their community and themselves. Bringing Jews closer to Judaism is a full-time job and more, and the Mayberg Foundation’s managing director, Amanda Mizrahi, noted that the dedicated professionals who serve this important role rarely have the opportunity to do the kind of important work on themselves that they ask and help others to do. It was this gap that led her to convene the pilot cohort of the Mayberg Foundation’s Maalot Collab, bringing together four Orthodox outreach organizations — M54/Chabad, Olami, Aish and NCSY — around a structure for learning and experimentation. 

That structure grew out of a task force Mizrahi first convened among staffers from M54, Aish and NCSY to explore their shared challenges directly. The Association for Jewish Outreach Programs, the field’s last holistic professional-development effort, had closed its doors in 2017, and while Chabad and Aish each host inspiring annual conferences, neither offers the kind of deep personal and professional support outreach professionals said they needed. 

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Over six months in 2024 and nine months in 2025, the Maalot Collab’s pilot cohort met regularly, with Mayberg Foundation providing grants alongside space for learning and experimentation. The results were tangible. Organizations began sharing resources across prior boundaries — NCSY circulated its new skills-and-development guide to the cohort, M54 was invited in by both Aish and NCSY to speak on personal growth, and Aish, drawing on ideas from the cohort, launched its own ProDev Leadership Cohort, an intensive training program for 12 handpicked outreach professionals, with participants reporting new approaches to everything from donor engagement to team management.

In October 2025, I joined the pilot program as project manager to lead its next phase: aligning stakeholders, launching pilot initiatives and building frameworks the field could scale more broadly. That work began with professionals from across these organizations coming together to ask a question the field rarely asks directly: What does a vibrant, sustained career in this work actually look like? Not a career that survived, but one that is still energized, still growing and still making a difference after 10, 20 or 30 years. 

To answer that question, I spent months in deep-dive interviews with 17 practitioners and organizational leaders, each nominated by their organization as a best-case example. I framed those interviews around four dimensions of a vibrant career: confidence, competence, motivation and relevance. The findings deserve the field’s attention.

Multiple pathways into Jewish outreach work

The field tends to assume that outreach professionals arrive through a single door: ideological commitment, a personal transformation, a sense of mission that is urgent and clear from the start. What we found was a far richer set of pathways into the work. Some practitioners entered through relationships, brought in by someone they trusted. Others entered through character fit, discovering they were simply good at this kind of work. Some came through circumstance, when an opportunity appeared at the right moment. And for others it was a gradual accumulation of experience that only later crystallized into a vocation. If Jewish outreach organizations only recruit for ideological fire, it narrows the pool and misses people who have exactly what sustained outreach work requires.

3 traits that showed up again and again

Across these conversations, three traits consistently showed up in thriving, long-term careers.

One was practiced independence: the ability to take ownership of one’s own learning and sense of purpose — to seek out the people doing the work well rather than waiting for direction.

Another was a diversified relationship to competence: a knack for building skill across the many overlapping roles the work demands, from event management and fundraising to communications and the long relational labor of accompanying people through decades of life. The practitioners who thrive access competence through several channels at once: formal learning, peer relationships, mentors, direct experimentation and honest self-assessment.

The final trait was the capacity to grow alongside a changing community, allowing those they serve to genuinely shape their thinking over time. Staying relevant, we found, is an active discipline, not a stable achievement.

The shifting measure of success

The practitioners who enter this work with urgency and visible impact as their primary measures do not stay there. Early-career practitioners measure success in individuals. Senior practitioners measure it in communities, across decades. That shift is not a loss of motivation but a deepening — from the excitement of early results toward something more patient and more rooted in a long understanding of what this work actually produces. 

Sustaining that shift requires two things: competence, which renews the desire to do the work as much as the ability to do it well, and a practiced ability to draw energy from several sources at once — a complementary role, a creative outlet, a family life, a spiritual practice, something that fills a practitioner up outside the work itself. This shift gives professionals a longer view of what success is and can be.

Naming the profession

Jewish outreach work is a demanding profession requiring a distinct skill set, years of development and a particular kind of staying power. Practitioners can develop real expertise in relationship building, community formation and walking alongside people through major life changes. That work, done well and sustained over time, is what makes it possible for more Jews to find their way to a richer, more meaningful Jewish life. 

This broad impact and skill development should be recognized as a field unto itself. Organizations, practitioners and the communities this work serves all stand to gain from articulating more clearly what this work actually is, what it demands and what a career in it can look like at its best. Pride, belonging and long-term sustainability in this work are not incidental to good outcomes. They are part of what produces them.

What comes next

These 17 interviews represent best-case careers across four organizations. They are a starting point, not a finish line. This fall, we take our next step: on Oct. 19–20, we will convene the InGathering, a small working gathering at the Mayberg Foundation bringing together a carefully selected group of practitioners and stakeholders from beyond the four founding organizations. Over a day and a half, participants will make sense of the report’s findings together, examine the forces that have shaped the field and its professionals, explore creative approaches to the challenges the research surfaces and develop concrete directions for the pilot program going forward. This includes a broader survey to test these findings across a wider population, and a rethinking of how organizations invest in their people from Day One.

Our goal is not just to understand the field better, but to help ensure that the people doing this vital work are equipped, supported and inspired to do it over the long term.

Stephen Markowitz is the project manager of the Mayberg Foundation’s Maalot Collab, formerly known as the Jewish Outreach Professional Development pilot program.