Good Tuesday morning!

Journalist Bari Weiss is among the writers, academics, artists and philanthropists who have banded together to found a new university on the grounds that American higher education is broken when faculty and students are being ousted and disciplined for their views, and when 40% of those who pursue a college degree don’t obtain one.

Weiss, a former New York Times editor who cited antisemitism when she resigned from her position at the paper, published an announcement of the new University of Austin’s founding in her newsletter, “Common Sense,” penned by the founding president, Pano Kanelos. Kanelos resigned his former position as president of St. John’s College in Annapolis, Md., three months ago.

Other founders include activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali; journalist Caitlin Flanagan; entrepreneur Joe Lonsdale; playwright David Mamet; and Larry Summers, former president of Harvard University and former U.S. treasury secretary. The group aims to raise $250 million and has already raised $10 million. They are applying for nonprofit status, and are fiscally sponsored by Lonsdale’s Cicero Research.

“The University of Austin is, at its heart, a project based on optimism. By getting the values, incentives, and interdisciplinary structure right from the beginning, we can restore the classically liberal university and the enlightenment values that made our civilization what it is,” wrote Lonsdale in the New York Post.

BIG BUZZ

Can the start-up nation save the bees?

Beewise

If you hail from the biblical Land of Milk and Honey, it might seem like the height of chutzpah to want to reengineer the beehive. But if you’re a savvy serial entrepreneur like Saar Safra, and you’re steeped in Israel’s start-up nation ethos, a better beehive may be a business sweet spot. “You walk in the streets here, and you see people everywhere building their next startup,” Safra, CEO of Beewise, a maker of robotic beehives, told eJewishPhilanthropy’s Helen Chernikoff. “The cost of failure is nonexistent. You go to work for one of the large corporations and get back to work on your next idea.”

Cornerstone species: That atmosphere inspired Safra to think outside the box. Specifically, the wooden box that’s known as a beehive, and that hasn’t changed in 150 years. For most of that time, the box served its purpose — housing a colony of bees, which consists of a queen and up to 100,000 workers and drones. The United States Department of Agriculture puts the percentage of the world’s food supply that depends on pollination by insects or animals at a third, and states that the global numbers of such pollinators are declining due to habitat loss, diseases, paradise and contaminants.

Building a better beehive: These factors are behind “colony collapse disorder,” or the phenomenon that occurs when the majority of worker bees disappear, which beekeepers worldwide started to notice in the early 2000s. In some parts of the world the problem has become less severe, but in the United States, losses remain high. The old-fashioned wooden beehive isn’t equal to these challenges, Safra said, which is why he cofounded Beewise. Another reason: His wife informed him about five years ago that it was time, after almost two decades abroad, to move back to Israel, which left him between jobs.

Putting down new roots: Safra had lived in Seattle for most of his adult life and was entrenched in the city professionally and personally. He’d served as a board member of the Jewish Day School of Metropolitan Seattle. He’d co-founded Uprise, a fundraising platform focused on causes, not politicians, and worked for Microsoft when it acquired a digital advertising company where Safra had built a 30-person department. “I was plugged in,” he said. “Then I got to Israel and I saw how a country prioritizes startups.”

Read the full article here.

OUTDOORS TRUMPS INDOORS EVERY TIME

Nurturing in nature

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“The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the way we think about and plan for a new school year. For Jewish schools in particular, where celebrating Shabbat and holidays together is fundamental to our core values, we have been forced to reimagine everything we used to do to help create community and to support our preschool families,” writes Jen Schiffer, director of the Temple Beth Sholom Early Childhood Center in Roslyn Heights, N.Y., in an opinion piece for eJewishPhilanthropy.

Silver lining: “The natural world is a powerful teacher. All you need to do is step outside your front door to access it. A silver lining of COVID-19 is an increase in time spent outdoors. Fresh air, sunshine and the sounds of birds chirping awakens the senses in ways that teaching indoors cannot. At [our school], teachers regularly take the children on nature walks looking for leaves, pine cones and any natural ‘treasures’ the children can find. Work on an outdoor classroom is underway, where children will spend time in all weather, playing in the mud kitchen, climbing on tree stumps and making music using pots, pans and wooden spoons.”

Outdoors trumps indoors every time: “This school year, we come together outdoors during the school day, and whenever possible, we invite caregivers and families to join us… On Shabbat morning, we invite families with young children to join us for Mini Minyan services in our outdoor tented space, with nature as our backdrop. Reciting blessings and singing songs in the fresh air just feels different than doing these same things indoors.”

Read the full piece here.

“The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the way we think about and plan for a new school year. For Jewish schools in particular, where celebrating Shabbat and holidays together is fundamental to our core values, we have been forced to reimagine everything we used to do to help create community and to support our preschool families,” writes Jen Schiffer, director of the Temple Beth Sholom Early Childhood Center in Roslyn Heights, N.Y., in an opinion piece for eJewishPhilanthropy.

Silver lining: “The natural world is a powerful teacher. All you need to do is step outside your front door to access it. A silver lining of COVID-19 is an increase in time spent outdoors. Fresh air, sunshine and the sounds of birds chirping awakens the senses in ways that teaching indoors cannot. At [our school], teachers regularly take the children on nature walks looking for leaves, pine cones and any natural ‘treasures’ the children can find. Work on an outdoor classroom is underway, where children will spend time in all weather, playing in the mud kitchen, climbing on tree stumps and making music using pots, pans and wooden spoons.”

Outdoors trumps indoors every time: “This school year, we come together outdoors during the school day, and whenever possible, we invite caregivers and families to join us… On Shabbat morning, we invite families with young children to join us for Mini Minyan services in our outdoor tented space, with nature as our backdrop. Reciting blessings and singing songs in the fresh air just feels different than doing these same things indoors.”

Read the full piece here.

FORGIVE OURSELVES

The paradox of pain

iStock

“COVID has taught us to sanctify the ordinary. The blessing of flour on the shelves at the grocery store, of a friend’s hug, of time with loved ones. In the slowing of our lives, we see what matters – and how much we have been given. What if we were able and made the effort to sanctify what we have, rather than notice what’s missing?” writes Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion faculty member Betsy S. Stone in an opinion piece for eJewishPhilanthropy.

Pain: “Here’s what I learned about pain as a psychologist: Pain makes us kinder or pain makes us harder. Pain can open our hearts or close them. Pain shows us that we are part of a whole that we cherish, or that no one matters more than me. Pain warms us or it freezes us. Pain teaches, but we don’t get to choose the lesson.”

Setting a new bar: “From the outset of the pandemic, I have been advising people to set the bar lower. We still need goals, but they must be achievable in this new, challenging world. Expect less of yourself. Be willing to be satisfied with what you can do now, not with what you could do before. If the sermon isn’t polished, so be it. If your house is messy, that’s OK. If your kids are learning now what they should have learned last year, roll with it. Let this pain teach us what matters.”

Forgive ourselves: “And let’s forgive ourselves for hurting, for being reactive and slow and moody and weepy. For many of us, the last 19 months have been the biggest ongoing challenge of our lives.

Worthy Reads

Purchasing Power: In Time, Alana Semuels describes the conundrum of Kalamazoo, Mich., which is enjoying the largesse of two billionaires who launched a foundation to close city budget gaps, but who also demanded that in return the city would have to quash a tax plan it thought was the solution to budget woes. Now the foundation controls the city’s spending: It allocates a grant, which the city must use first to offset reduced property taxes and to stabilize the budget, and then to fund “aspirational” projects that the foundation also shapes. “I don’t see anybody else gaining other than our children, our neighborhoods, the folks that need jobs, our businesses that we were able to help get through COVID,” said Bobby Hopewell, who was the city’s mayor for 12 years. [Time]

Work In Progress: Yair Rosenberg, who left Tablet after 10 years to start a newsletter at The Atlantic, weighed in on the state of the Jewish community on Jewish Insider’s “Limited Liability Podcast,” reflecting that while Jewish life is changing, it’s still indisputably alive with charities doing good work, tech-savvy innovators and compelling artists and writers. Rosenberg pointed out the tendency to fret about the fate of legacy organizations despite the fact that other communities yearn for the capacity and efficacy of Jewish institutions. “I don’t think American Jewish life is going to look in 20 years like it did 20 years ago, but I don’t think that will disappear, and it’s just wreckage,” Rosenberg said. [JI]

All About Love: Nonprofit leaders soliciting funding are intensely aware of the power dynamic inherent in that request, remarks Dana Doll in a blog post on the Center for Effective Philanthropy’s website that asks her colleagues on the funding side to strive to become equally aware of it. Funders should delve into new research that suggests new ways to think about how to evaluate nonprofits’ impact, and explores why most funders don’t offer more general operating support although they know it has proved effective. “As a faith-based funder, my faith tells me that if I’m doing anything in philanthropy right, that love should be at the center of it — love for beneficiaries and for nonprofit leaders,” Doll concludes. [CenterEffectivePhilanthropy]

Pic of the Day

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The second cohort of the Rekindle Fellowship, the Jewish Federation of Cleveland’s Black-Jewish dialogue, concluded Sunday. To date, the fellowship has graduated 26 fellows who are working on collaborative projects around youth connections, criminal justice reform, entrepreneurship and more.