Good Friday morning!

The Chabad-Lubavitch movement’s mental health organization, the Wellness Institute, will hold its first in-person summit on Aug. 11, Rabbi Zalman Abraham, the institute’s director, told eJewishPhilanthropy.

Jeff’s Place, an addiction recovery center in Atlanta that’s supported by the Clinton Foundation, will host the summit, which Abraham described as non-denominational, but spiritual.

The Blue Dove Foundation, whose mission is to destigmatize mental illness in the Jewish community; the Berman Center, a treatment facility in Atlanta and the local Jewish Family & Career Services are partners in the event. Patrick Kennedy, a former congressman who is a mental health advocate; Allan Berger, an addiction expert; and Rona Novick, dean of the Azrieli Graduate School of Jewish Education, are among the speakers.

The summit will be in-person only, as Rabbi Eliyahu Shusterman,founder of Jeff’s Place and the spiritual leader of Chabad Intown Atlanta, felt people were “Zoomed out,” Abraham said. The goal is to attract about 100 people, although more might attend because they will be in town for the National Jewish Retreat, an annual educational event sponsored by the Rohr Jewish Learning Institute, which housed the Wellness Institute until it became independent.

The event is open only to people who have been vaccinated against or recently recovered from COVID-19, but Abraham didn’t know if Jeff’s Place would require proof of vaccination.

UNLIKELY STORY

How Daniella Mechnikov went from doing communications for a food pantry to running it

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Daniella Mechnikov was a communications professional who longed to add meaning to her work by adding mission-driven nonprofits to her client list when she was hired as a consultant for Yad Ezra, a kosher food pantry in Berkley, Mich., a suburb of Detroit. Then the pandemic struck, and she volunteered to create the organization’s food delivery system — which led to her eventually becoming executive director, Mechnikov told eJewishPhilanthropy’s Helen Chernikoff.

Better than expected: “I thought I would be helping with events, editing some stuff online, helping with messaging,” she said. “But they needed someone to do another role, and my work was quiet. I became very enmeshed.” Founded in 1990 when the local Jewish community realized that Jews in their midst included people living in poverty and relying on government programs like food stamps, Yad Ezra offers only kosher products, Mechnikov said. The organization has a staff of six and a list of 400 volunteers, and provides about 2,500 individuals every month with food. It also offers kosher school lunch programs and financial assistance for life-cycle events. It has a farm on the grounds of a Catholic church that donated the land; volunteers run the farm and its produce goes to Yad Ezra clients.

Sacrificing choice: The role Mechnikov was called to fill was a necessity born of the pandemic. Yad Ezra had been known as a “client choice” food pantry, in which those who needed food assistance visited a warehouse, picked out their groceries and took them home. “It’s the most respectful way to do it,” Mechnikov said. “That was such a big part of our identity.” The pandemic made it unsafe to gather in the warehouse, which meant Yad Ezra was forced to sacrifice the choice model for one in which staff packed boxes of food, identical but for the amounts, which were determined by the size of the recipient family. Volunteers delivered the packages, and Mechnikov was tasked with organizing the delivery operation, a complicated job that involved using spreadsheets to match hundreds of drivers with more than a thousand clients.

New experience: “The skill set that was required had very little to do with my recent use of my brain,” she said. “But we all connected as a team and it saved me, to have a purpose like that.” Mechnikov grew up in the Detroit area. She attended the University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor, and as a young adult worked in Boston, where she met her husband. They returned to her childhood home to be near family while raising their own kids. Originally a Yiddish instructor at the University of Michigan and Brandeis University, she became a supplementary school administrator at various synagogues in the Detroit suburbs and then, 12 years ago, started a marketing company. She served a diverse clientele, including many local lawyers, whom she helped with websites, promotional materials, billboards and television advertising.

Read the full story here.

FUTURE FOCUSED

Investing for impact

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“When I had my Bar Mitzvah, I was lucky to have friends and family who gave me many gifts; there were books, Judaica, paints, and of course, the one that everyone wants, cold hard cash (or checks). I must have raked in around $5,000, which was a lot of money. I put it in my bank account, and no one said anything. But there it sat, like a hole in my pocket. I invested a large portion of it in an experience that I would never forget, and the rest I invested in purchasing candy – an investment I am still paying off the losses for with dental bills.” writes Rabbi Alon Meltzer of Or Chadash Synagogue in Sydney, Australia, in an opinion piece for eJewishPhilanthropy.

New initiative launched: “A few months ago, I was sharing this anecdote with colleagues. Most people had similar situations and feelings, and what ensued was a brainstorming session around how we could take this issue and develop a comprehensive program to engage post Bar and Bat Mitzvah kids. Fast forward three months, and we have just launched The Nadav Project.”

The Nadav Project: “The Nadav Project is an intergenerational learning program set over five workshops, that sets out to redefine the role of money in society through a Jewish perspective and create a culture of sustainable and impactful giving. Teens and their parents will learn about the financial institutions and tools to create impactful and sustainable portfolios, while also deeply advancing their Jewish knowledge.”

Read the full piece here.

CLIMBING THE MOUNTAIN

Supporting novice educators through induction

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“CASJE’s latest research paper, ‘Preparing for Entry: Fresh Perspectives on How and Why People Become Jewish Educators’ uses the image of a funnel to describe how candidates enter the field of Jewish education. As someone who leads a program that supports novice educators in Jewish day schools, I would like to suggest that the metaphor of a mountain is more apt. People don’t enter the field through a gravitational force that pulls them in unless they actively step out. We need to provide prospective Jewish educators with evidence-based support structures – ‘enabling experiences’ – that allow the prospects to successfully scale the mountain of knowledge and skills that are needed to thrive in Jewish education careers and effectively serve their learners,” writes Nina Bruder, executive director of the Jewish New Teacher Project of New Teacher Center, in an opinion piece for eJewishPhilanthropy.

Induction: “New teacher induction draws upon research in the fields of adult learning and professional learning. It is job-embedded. It leverages the expertise of more experienced educators to support novice educators. It is based on a set of teaching standards and best practices that have clear indicators of practice and growth. It involves goal setting along a continuum of practice. It employs a coaching model that solicits reflection rather than instruction. It utilizes an iterative inquiry cycle of idea-implementation-reflection. It focuses more on pedagogy than on subject matter so it is equally effective in Judaic subjects and secular subjects, across all grades, and across all religious denominations.”

Read the full piece here.

Worthy Reads

Ideal Number: Society’s passion for metrics and measurements is increasingly infiltrating philanthropy, with the result that acts of charity are being treated like widgets to the detriment of the enterprise, suggests Jack Fowler in Philanthropy Daily. Not everything can be measured, he notes, and sometimes what is measurable is not valuable — but making that judgement is difficult when numbers are assumed to be the ultimate evaluation tool. “While we are bound to live in an age of measurement, we live in an age of mismeasurement, over-measurement, misleading measurement, and counterproductive measurement,” Fowler writes. [PhilanthropyDaily]

New Rules: Writing in the Chronicle of Philanthropy, Lorri L. Jean, the CEO of the Los Angeles LGBT Center, reveals the thought process behind her organization’s decision to require its nearly 800 employees to get the COVID-19 vaccination and to say goodbye to nine who resigned rather than get inoculated. While some who didn’t want to vaccinate worked from home, Jean and her colleagues didn’t feel it would be fair to force front-line workers to vaccinate and let others refuse; they also felt any refusals could jeopardize client safety. “In short, public health overrides many of those concerns, particularly since some of our clients, due to lack of access or social and economic barriers to health care, may not be vaccinated. If our own staff is unvaccinated, we expose our clients to unnecessary risk — a risk we simply cannot take. [ChroniclePhilanthropy]

Prodigal Philanthropist: Donna Stoering, the piano prodigy and philanthropist who founded the music-focused nonprofit Listen for Life, has launched a project that creates world-class musical programs for hospital use, reports Heather Graham in a Daily Utah Chronicle profile of Stoering, who recently moved to Salt Lake City. Founded in 1998, Listen for Life is a volunteer organization that supports various international music projects, such as Travels With Music, an archive of video whose aim is to preserve traditions that struggle to compete with global pop culture. “There’s a soundtrack to everything,” Stoering said. “And music is so much more than a soundtrack. It’s a healing tool. It’s communication. That’s the thing I try to get across to people.” [DailyUtahChronicle]

Pic of the Day

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Cyclists with Team Israel Start-Up Nation posing on the Champs-Élysées