Good Tuesday morning!

Today is Giving Tuesday, recognized globally as the day to give to charity, created in 2012 by by the 92nd Street Y and the United Nations Foundation.

The fifth annual employee experience survey from Leading Edge, which helps Jewish organizations improve their workplace culture, found that some aspects of teamwork that were most directly affected by the pandemic either stayed the same or improved between 2019 and 2021.

The survey, conducted every year since 2016 — with the exception of 2020, due to the pandemic — was conducted in May 2021. More than 11,600 people from 221 organizations took the survey, bringing the total to 35,000 people at 316 organizations. Leading Edge estimates that the Jewish nonprofit sector employs 73,000 people.

Employees felt more positive about collaboration,communication and their own effectiveness in 2021 compared with 2019, according to the survey, agreeing at higher rates to such statements as “My manager keeps me informed,” “At my organization there is open and honest two-way communication” and “I have enough autonomy to do my job effectively.”

Almost 40% of the participating organizations reported that they conducted furloughs or layoffs during the pandemic, while 47% said that they didn’t and 14% didn’t answer the question.

The survey aims to provide organizations and managers with information about whether employees feel proud, motivated and desirous of remaining at their workplace. The 2021 survey found for the first time that employees tend to stay at organizations they deem concerned about their well-being, and tend to leave those that don’t do so.

LEGACY GIFT

The Rabbi Sacks Legacy Trust visits the United States

Wikimedia Commons

A year after his death, relatives of the late Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks are ensuring that the former U.K. chief rabbi’s teachings carry on, in the form of an international trust that will collect and translate his writings and, in the case of audio and video, transcribe them for a global audience. “Rabbi Sacks was the leading world voice trying to address the issues of why we should be proud to be Jewish regardless of what our affiliation might be,” Alan Sacks, the rabbi’s brother, told eJewishPhilanthropy’s Helen Chernikoff. “Rabbi Sacks isn’t here to do that anymore, and our mission is to make sure his message isn’t lost.”

A dedicated team: Based in the U.K., Sacks and Elliott Goldstein, the rabbi’s son-in-law, as well as the Rabbi Sacks Legacy Trust’s chief executive, Joanna Benarroch, are in the United States to introduce the initiative and its vision to potential supporters. Debby Ifield, Rabbi Sacks’s former office manager, and Dan Sacker, his former communications strategist, will also be employed by the trust. Central to that mission: conveying the rabbi’s conviction that a person can be both completely committed to Judaism, and completely engaged in the world, Alan Sacks said: “He was a deeply learned scholar who managed to see the entire modern world through his scholarly lens without blocking out any of that world.”

Global vision: The trust, which is partnering with Yeshiva University in the recently announced Sacks-Herenstein Center for Values and Leadership, aims to reach people in the United States; British Commonwealth countries such as the U.K., Canada, South Africa and Australia; Israel; Russia; and South America. In the U.S., the trust will operate as the Covenant & Conversation Corporation, a 501c3, whose trustees are Alan Sacks, Goldstein and philanthropist Naomi Hass-Perlman. Educators will turn materials into curriculum in the hope of infusing the rabbi’s thought throughout the Jewish world via its teachers. In Israel, the trust’s goal is to create a think tank where new leaders can be developed and trained to tackle critical social and political issues, such as climate change, and to offer curricula to teachers. 

Read more here.

bright future

The rededication of an institution — a modern-day Hanukkah tale

NMAJH

“Each year as I celebrate Hanukkah with my family and enjoy the warmth and light of the season, I reflect with gratitude on the passing of another Gregorian year, and I luxuriate in an abundance of latkes and sufganiyot — an indulgence before the inevitable New Year’s commitment to salads and stationary bikes,” writes Misha Galperin, CEO of the National Museum of American Jewish History, in an opinion piece for eJewishPhilanthropy. 

Mission-focused: “This year, like every year, I am also reflecting on the Hanukkah story itself — that of the ancient struggle to keep the stories and culture of the Jewish people alive. At the National Museum of American Jewish History we challenge ourselves every day to best execute on our dual mission of engaging Jews more deeply with their heritage, culture and history while striving to engage all Americans (and foreign visitors) with the richness and diversity of the American Jewish story. But the tale of Hanukkah resonates even more deeply and feels even more poignant to me this year.”

New name, new gift: “On Dec. 6, the final day of Hanukkah 5782, we will officially announce a new name for the museum, in recognition of an extraordinary new gift from an extraordinary old friend: genius designer, fearless entrepreneur, successful businessman, generous philanthropist and real mensch, Stuart Weitzman. NMAJH will now be known as the Weitzman National Museum of American Jewish History. Stuart has also made a meaningful gift to establish the Stuart Weitzman Endowment Fund, which will help support future exhibitions and other activities of the museum.”

Read the full piece here.

ENDOWMENT INVESTING

Jewish foundations and nonprofits: Align your investments with your philanthropic goals

iStock

“Endowment investments are the lifeblood of private and community foundations, providing the financial returns that enable foundations to make grants to nonprofits. Unfortunately, these investments are often managed in a way that actually undermines the foundation’s philanthropic work,” writes Michael Lustig, author of A Guide to Jewish Impact Investing, in an opinion piece for eJewishPhilanthropy.

Common practice: “Endowment investment managers, usually appointed by the foundation’s board, tend to focus solely on maximizing financial returns and in doing so rarely make the active choice of screening out investments that are entirely antithetical to the foundation’s mission, or to consider investing in for-profit enterprises that help further the foundation’s goals. Guiding this behavior has been the assumption that unconstrained investing leads to higher returns, which then allows for more grantmaking. This assumption is not always accurate, and it comes at the expense of potentially schizophrenic inconsistency, such as when a public health-minded foundation invests in Big Tobacco or an environmental funder owns shares in the very oil companies its grantees are fighting.”

Not kosher investments: “Not only do few foundations and endowment-holding nonprofits work to align their investments with their philanthropic goals, some actively discourage doing so. A number of years ago, when I attempted to steer a mission-aligned Israeli investment to a large Jewish nonprofit on whose board I served, I was told outright that the asset managers had been instructed not to give consideration to Israel-related investments… The organization was spending considerable resources in Israel, doing an enormous amount of good there and achieving meaningful impact in a multitude of areas, yet its investing was completely segregated from its grantmaking work. Essentially the endowment was meat while the allocations were milk, and the organization wanted to maintain a very strict level of kashrut by keeping them entirely separate.”

Read the full piece here.

Worthy Reads

Famous Last Words: Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, who is resigning from his position as CEO, recently said that he planned to leave the company to focus on cryptocurrency and philanthropy, write Kate Conger and Lauren Hirsch in The New York Times. Last April, Dorsey donated $1 billion to coronavirus relief and other philanthropic efforts, and he is also a supporter of guaranteed-income projects, in which the needy receive cash instead of other benefits. “I want you all to know that this was my decision and I own it,” Dorsey wrote in a letter to Twitter employees. “I’m really sad… yet really happy.” [NYTimes]

Survivor Support: There are over 350,000 Holocaust survivors worldwide, and despite the widespread misconception that reparations cover their basic needs, a third of them live below the poverty line and almost 80% struggle to perform activities like cooking, washing and dressing, reports Connie Matthiesen in an Inside Philanthropy profile of The Blue Card, a survivor support organization. The organization was created in Germany in 1934 to help Jewish people facing discrimination in the early Nazi period, and today it is backed by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies and others, but is still largely unknown. “We are told all the time that people haven’t heard of The Blue Card, and that is something we’re working on changing,” said the group’s executive director, Masha Pearl. [InsidePhilanthropy]

Pic of the Day

Haim Zach, Government Press Office

Participants in UJA-Federation of New York’s mission to Israel and the United Arab Emirates, led by the group’s president, Amy Bressman, and Itzik Shmuli, director-general of UJA’s Israel office, met yesterday with Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett in Jerusalem to discuss issues including American Jewry and Israel’s relationship and cooperation with Arab countries.