Good Thursday morning! 

Ed. note: Your Daily Phil will be enjoying a summer Friday off and will be back in your inbox on Monday morning. Have a good weekend!

In yesterday’s edition of Your Daily Phil, we did not link to the full story on MyZuzah. You can read the full piece here.

Four Jewish federations in South Florida, along with 12 other local Jewish agencies, are coming together later this month for the Keshet Leadership Project to learn how best to engage queer Jews. The consulting and training initiative is the first major foray into programming for Florida by Keshet, the national Jewish LGBTQ organization.

While the leadership project, which has existed for over a decade, is usually led through one local convener agency, Tracey Labgold, the Florida education and training manager for Keshet, noticed that several regional federations had good relationships with each other.

“What better way to support each other in the work than to ask [the four federations] to come together and lead this effort,” Labgold told eJewishPhilanthropy. “Everyone said yes, it was a really easy ask…they were really excited for opportunities to work together.”

The project includes the Jewish Federation of South Palm Beach County; the Greater Miami Jewish Federation; the Jewish Federation of Broward County; and the Jewish Federation of Palm Beach County. The federations are helping to cover the cost of the program for other participants, supplementing core Keshet funding from donors such as the Jim Joseph Foundation, and the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies.

To officially launch the yearlong initiative, 50 South Florida Jewish professionals will meet on Aug. 25 for a day of learning and self-assessment about how effective their LGBTQ engagement is at the moment, and what can be improved.

Then, the professionals will “create, and have Keshet’s input on, a customized action plan [to improve LGBTQ engagement] that is going to be ambitious and sustainable,” said Rabbi Micah Buck-Yael, Keshet’s national director of education and a co-facilitator of the project. Organizations will then have five coaching calls over the course of the next 12 months with Labgold, alongside several webinars, to help implement their plans.

Keshet’s expansion into Florida comes after several years of the state’s Republican leadership targeting the queer community, culminating in the passage of the Don’t Say Gay bill, which bans discussion of gender identity or sexual orientation in public schools. The bill was passed under the guise of protecting parents’ rights to manage their children’s education, bolstered by homophobic allegations that children are being sexualized or groomed by LGBTQ teachers.

“We have seen increasing interest in our work in Florida over the past number of years,” Buck-Yael said. It’s “a place where LGBTQ+ people in all communities – so that extends to LGBTQ+ people in the Jewish community – are really on the front lines of what is happening in the political and cultural arena right now.”

That environment makes it all the more important that Jewish organizations foster a welcoming and supportive community for LGBTQ Jews, Labgold and Buck-Yael said, and for Keshet to prioritize work in Florida.

Jewish professionals “might be working with a young person or a longtime staff member who is being essentially kicked in the gut by these laws or proposed laws,” Buck-Yael said. They need to have the skills “and the tools to say, you belong here, and this is a place of dignity and safety for you.”

CONVERSATIONAL RESET

Poised for growth, Resetting the Table aims to shift ‘rigidity into receptivity’

Michele Eve Photography

As the associate vice president for campus affairs at the Jewish United Fund of Chicago and executive director of the Hillels of Illinois, Emily Briskman oversees nearly 60 Hillel professionals, many of whom spend significant time dealing with on-campus expressions of antisemitism and anti-Zionism. Through her work with Hillels, Briskman has participated in programs run by Resetting the Table, an organization dedicated to building dialogue and deliberation across political divides, eJewishPhilanthropy’s Esther D. Kustanowitz reports. 

Expanding the table: First created with seed funding from UJA-Federation of New York in 2013, and becoming an independent organization the following year, Resetting the Table is in a phase of growth and expansion. Recently, Steven Spielberg and Kate Capshaw’s Hearthland Foundation began funding Resetting the Table programs happening outside of Jewish spaces, reaching multi-faith clergy and other leaders working to combat toxic polarization.

Cross-section conversations: “We didn’t want a uniform or a monolithic group of people talking to each other who all agreed,” Briskman told eJP. “We really wanted to get that idea of what’s going on across the community. That intergenerational piece for us was so important,” she said. “Generational differences, especially on Israel, can be deeply polarizing,” she added. 

Read the full story here.

TIME FOR CHANGE

The importance of childcare and early learning investments

Courtesy

“In August of 2021, Anna Hartman wrote in eJP that Jewish values inform a call to action for robust investments in early childhood education. ‘The time for change is now,’ she expressed as Congress considered the Build Back Better Act. Yet here we are, one year later, outraged, and still demanding action,” writes Ilana Dvorin Friedman, the early child childhood policy analyst at the Jewish United Fund in Chicago, in an opinion piece for eJewishPhilanthropy.

Current legislation: “On Sunday, Aug. 7, the Senate passed the Inflation Reduction Act (a shadow of the Build Back Better Act passed by the House of Representatives in the fall and was never approved by the Senate). The historic legislation that passed through the budget reconciliation process includes tax reform and provisions for health care and clean energy.”

Childcare and early learning are MIA: “While the Inflation Reduction Act includes noteworthy legislation, childcare and early learning are noticeably absent… Upsetting, yes. Surprising, sadly not. Our nation has a tradition of reluctantly addressing childcare in the wake of calamity without designs for stable, ongoing solutions.”

Pandemic illumination: “Similarly, it took a global pandemic to illuminate the essential role of childcare in our society and economy. The pandemic exacerbated the challenges of the childcare sector’s impracticable system of low revenue, unlivable wages, shortage of licensed childcare providers and insurmountable strain on families’ budgets.”

Read the full piece here.

Worthy Reads

Sparking Innovation: Some nonprofits have an easier time adopting innovation than others, Benjamin Kumpf and Emma Proud write in Stanford Social Innovation Review, and teams that strategically consider certain factors and pursue an explicit vision for the adoption of innovation are the ones that make the most progress toward adopting innovation, they said. This vision should include a culture of collaboration and learning and an organizational context: “The organizational culture supports adoption. This means collaboration — high levels of connectedness, trust, knowledge of others’ work, and drive to collaborate between different teams or divisions — as well as processes and managers who support people and teams to take risks, fail fast, learn, and share the learning internally and externally. The organizational context enables adoption. This means alignment with priorities — in which the innovation supports key organizational priorities, or is itself a clear priority — as well as an administrative environment in which policies are agile, minimal, and speak to fundamental values and drivers. This also means procurement and contracting processes are flexible enough to enable experimentation and enable adoption.” [SSIR]

Community Listening and Collaboration: Stacy Schusterman, a 2022 winner of the Carnegie Medal of Philanthropy and the chair of the Charles & Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies, spoke at a virtual Chronicle of Philanthropy forum about women philanthropists, Maria Di Mento writes. “The pandemic and other recent events, Schusterman says, demonstrate how quickly societal systems that are vital to people and a well-functioning democracy can be weakened or threatened. For example, Schusterman says, the pandemic showed the importance of access to paid leave and help with child care because so many women had to leave the work force to care for sick or vulnerable loved ones… ‘We are really doubling down on all of those things by joining collaboratives and listening to communities and getting their input on how we can more collaboratively work with them to help solve the problems that these communities are most impacted by,’ says Schusterman. ‘We’re taking a long-term approach by making multi-year general operating grants to our grantees so they can be more nimble in addressing these problems.’” [ChronicleofPhilanthropy]

Pic of the Day

Chabad.org/News

Following decades of regular visits by Chabad roving rabbis, Bermuda will be getting the nation’s first permanent Chabad House, led by Rabbi Chaim and Menuchy Birnhack.