Good Friday morning!

In today’s Your Daily Phil, we cover the crisis at Maimonides, a large Brooklyn hospital in a heavily Orthodox neighborhood, and feature a reflection by Rabbi Steven Philp on the growth of Mishkan Chicago. Also included in the newsletter are Daniel Lubetzky, Garry Kasparov, Col. Alexander Vindman, José Andrés, Yanky Meyer and two late British leaders: Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks and Queen Elizabeth II. We’ll start with some news about an unusual grant for small nonprofits. 

A recent set of Jewish grants was relatively open-ended, allowing nonprofit applicants to make their cases for a range of proposals. But one clause was out of the ordinary: The money couldn’t be used on the group’s programs or operations.

Rather, the $70,000 in Wellness Grants from UpStart that were disbursed to 16 organizations earlier this summer, and are being reported for the first time here, are meant to provide personal care to employees at Jewish nonprofits with budgets under $500,000. The grants ranged from $4,000 to $5,000.

UpStart, which provides training, resources and networking to early- and growth-stage Jewish groups, felt the grants were necessary after the transformations of recent years. It’s the latest sign that after spending years addressing the COVID-19 pandemic itself, Jewish groups and funders are pivoting to reckoning with the world it created.

“It’s been a stressful period for every human,” Aliza Mazor, UpStart’s chief field-building officer, told eJewishPhilanthropy. “People are becoming disenchanted with work, and I think that gets exacerbated at smaller nonprofits where the compensation is just not competitive. And so, I think this trend is really about putting people at the center of what we do.”

The accepted proposals included yoga, massages, manicures, a day at the beach, spa treatments and gift cards. At Svivah, a Jewish women’s community organization with a budget under $200,000 and one full-time and two part-time employees, a chunk of the $5,000 grant went to providing childcare for its founding director, who works mostly without a salary.

“For those of us who are working hard to keep our lights on and to grow and keep our venture sustainable — we put every dollar toward our work,” said Ariele Mortkowitz, the founding director. “They clearly understand that to keep the work going and the people who give everything to the work going you have to nourish those people too.” 

UpStart also awarded 12 Collaboratory Challenge Grants — each to a team of multiple organizations that will work on a project together. The grants are an outgrowth of the Collaboratory, UpStart’s conference this past spring for its network, and are collectively worth $195,000.

One of the grantee pairs is Keshet, the Jewish LGBTQ organization, and Gateways, which provides educational opportunities to Jewish children with disabilities. The two groups will train each other on LGBTQ inclusion and disability inclusion.

“We are both organizations that are about attention to historically and currently marginalized constituencies within Jewish life and the broader world,” said Idit Klein, Keshet’s president and CEO. “What we hope we gain through this partnership is a more profound and comprehensive understanding of people with disabilities who are within the constituencies that we work with.”

Read the full story here.

EXPLAINER

The battle over Brooklyn’s Maimonides Medical Center – a guide for the perplexed

Spencer Platt/Getty Images

In May 2021, Maimonides Medical Center seemed like it was riding high, with an expansion and a naming rights deal at a local stadium. Sixteen months later, the hospital in the heavily Jewish Brooklyn neighborhood of Borough Park is in crisis, having lost $145 million last year amid complaints of poor patient care, reports eJewishPhilanthropy’s Ben Sales.

A year of bad news: The loss of $145 million is just the latest piece of bad news to emerge for Maimonides, Brooklyn’s largest hospital, which mostly serves low-income patients. The year has been punctuated by news stories detailing overcrowding, alleged malpractice, employee protest and questionable financial practices. The coverage came after the hospital received poor ratings from the state Department of Health and another government agency.

A growing protest: In light of these reports, a protest movement seeks to oust the hospital’s management and improve its conditions. Called “Save Maimonides,” the group, founded earlier this year, is based locally and held a gathering late last month in Borough Park that reportedly drew more than 1,000 people.

Maimonides responds: Maimonides has responded to the complaints by telling eJP that its budget gap is narrowing and its care is top-notch. It has expressed confidence that a state government funding program for hospitals that rely on Medicaid, which it became eligible for late last year, will help get it back to a surer footing.

Read the full story here.

MIXED MULTITUDE

Mishkan Chicago: The growing pains of a synagogue startup

Courtesy of Mishkan Chicago

“One of the climactic moments of the Torah comes at the end of the book of Exodus when, after a long process of assembling the materials for and constructing the mishkan, the presence of God comes to fill this sacred meeting place that the Israelites have created in the center of their camp. One could make a compelling case that we should end the story here. From the middle of Genesis to the closing chapters of Exodus, our ancestors have transitioned from a small, extended family to a relatively large, multiethnic people – a ‘mixed multitude’ that has journeyed from slavery, to redemption, to revelation,” writes Rabbi Steven Philp, associate rabbi at Mishkan Chicago, in an opinion piece for eJewishPhilanthropy.

A mishkan in Chicago: “Ten years ago, I was asked to help build another kind of sacred meeting place for Jews and their loved ones. Mishkan Chicago was founded on the idea that our ancient tradition could be a relevant and meaningful source of comfort, inspiration and justice for the modern world. Guided by the principle of radical inclusivity, we became the spiritual home for many who had felt marginalized by institutional Judaism: LGBTQ+ folk; interfaith families; progressive activists and community organizers; people with complicated feelings about Israel and Palestine; individuals exploring Jewish spaces for the first time; and more. Our first Friday evening service was held in a living room. Within a few years we had moved from people’s homes, to bars and social halls, to 1,000-seat theaters. We had built our own mishkan, a mobile space for people to come together and encounter the sacred in a new way. We moved into the next chapter of our communal story, a Levitical process parallel to the one outlined in the Bible as the Israelites wandered in the wilderness. We had to create the rules and regulations that would sustain us through the journey ahead.”

Growth and change: “In 2014, I left Chicago to attend rabbinical school… When I was asked to come back to Mishkan last year to serve as their third rabbi, we had transformed from a volunteer-driven startup to a community of over 600 households with a full-time staff of 15 people… Being away from Mishkan for seven years and now returning as a member of the rabbinic team allows for a unique vantage point. There has been phenomenal growth, both in terms of numbers of people and in terms of the quality of the programming. But I also see what gets lost in the process of such dramatic growth.”

Read the full piece here.

Worthy Reads

Royal Report: In Jewish Insider, Jenni Frazer looks at Prince Charles’ relationship with the U.K.’s Jewish community. “The new king’s long relationship with the Jewish community can perhaps best be viewed through the lens of tolerance. As the Prince of Wales, a title he assumed in 1969, Charles had almost no official or unofficial links with the Jewish community in the early years of his adult life. But lately, it is a rare communal event that is not blessed with the prince’s presence, such as direct, hands-on patronage of charities such as World Jewish Relief (the humanitarian arm of British Jews), the Jewish Museum, the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, or the youth movement, the Jewish Lads’ and Girls’ Brigade. He made history in 2013 by attending the installation of Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis, with whom he has a relationship, at a London synagogue, becoming the first royal to participate in such an event.” [JI]

Beating Inflation: When inflation is high, foundations should increase payments during the latter years of a grant, write Adam Simon and Steven Laufer of the Aviv Foundation in The Chronicle of Philanthropy: “When inflation is high, costs outpace the expected grant income, undermining the reason for making a long-term grant in the first place. That’s why we have come to believe that in times of unexpected inflation, foundations should increase payments during the latter years of a grant. The Aviv Foundation recently did just that, increasing the 2022 payments on most of our U.S. multiyear grants by 4 percent. This means that a $200,000 grant we made in 2021, with expectations to pay $100,000 in 2021 and $100,000 in 2022, is now a $204,000 grant, with the 2022 payment increased to $104,000. .… We realize that this one-time increase will not on its own solve the problem of rising costs. We hope, though, that it serves as one small piece of a larger puzzle and that other foundations will follow a similar course.” [ChronicleofPhilanthropy]

Ditch the Swag: With the return of in-person conferences, new companies — like Givsly, which helps organizations gain brand awareness through charitable giving, rather than swag, and sustainable swag company Merchery — are entering the market to replace cheap and wasteful conference swag, Elizabeth Segran reports in Fast Company: “[Givsly’s] idea is to give recipients an opportunity to give money to a cause instead of receiving a material item. At first, companies were hesitant to do this, for fear that recipients wouldn’t find a donation compelling or memorable, so [Givsly CEO Chad] Hickey encouraged companies to give them a choice between the two. Givsly tracked the outcome and found that between 40% and 60% of people chose the donation over the swag item… Merchery has launched a platform that allows companies to create a simple website where people can choose from a couple of gift options to find one that they want. This works particularly well for things like holiday gifts for clients or employees. ‘Even if a company creates a beautiful Yeti water bottle or Patagonia jacket, the employee may not want that item,’ [founder Simon] Polet says. ‘So, why not give them the choice, so they can get something they will actually use for a long time? In the end, coming back to a product over and over is the way to really cultivate loyalty.’” [FastCompany]

Pic of the Day

MATT DUNHAM/AFP via Getty Images

Flashback: Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II (right), who died Thursday in Balmoral, Scotland, at 96 after a 70-year reign as monarch, is shown the Codex Valmadonna I book by Jewish guests Vivian Wineman, president of Board of Deputies of British Jews (left); Maurice Ostro, chairman of Ostro Minerals Schweiz AG; and Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth Jonathan Sacks, at a Diamond Jubilee multifaith reception at Lambeth Palace in London on Feb. 15, 2012.