Explore ways that your funding can build a more vibrant, meaningful, inclusive, interconnected, creative and compassionate world.
Strategic funders are taking an increasingly active role in supporting their communities as a means of catalyzing change. This session looks at four models where foundations and Federations serve as facilitators and conveners for social change. These robust models include collective impact, creating networks to deepen collaboration and connection, and convening multiple stakeholders to assess community needs. Explore lessons to make the whole greater than the sum of the parts and consider how your foundation can be a positive change agent in the communities you serve.
China's rising economic influence has begun to impact the geopolitics of the Middle East with significant implications for Israel. Simultaneously, bilateral academic, cultural, and commercial exchanges between Israel and China have just begun to hit their stride. Learn how a handful of leading Jewish foundations stepped beyond traditional models of Israel advocacy to catalyze Sino-Israeli exchange, hear a leading Chinese expert's perspective on Israel and the Middle East, and discover exciting new projects to promote understanding and partnerships between Israel and China.
Please note: this session is closed to media and non-funders.
This experiential session explores the pressures and challenges involved in wealth and giving. Attendees will use tools to encourage conversations about what it means to have wealth, to clarify and express values associated with having wealth, to unearth assumptions around family, money and philanthropy, and to unpack assumptions about money that influence our behavior. Participants will identify money messages that inform who they are, the decisions they make around giving, and begin to articulate the messages around money they want to convey to others.
The nature of organizational life is in flux and the professional leadership corps of baby boomers is on the brink of retirement. A number of foundations in the Jewish and general community are working to stay ahead of that curve. This panel looks at questions including: who will be the professional leadership of the future? How will they be different from the current generation? What critical skills will be needed to lead the nonprofits of the future? How can we support leadership development now for organizations we haven’t yet envisioned? Where will we find our new talent pool—inside existing organizations, or among people who are currently elsewhere?
Why should networks matter to you as someone invested in Jewish life? Apply the general concepts from the opening keynote presentation and explore how strong networks amplify and enrich Jewish life. In this highly participatory session, you will hear examples of how funders can make network-building a central strategy of their grantmaking, and work with colleagues on how to apply these lessons to your own funding.
The polarization of the Jewish community is one of our most significant and intractable challenges. This participatory session provides insight into the seductive nature of polarization, how and why it happens—and how it can be countered. You’ll learn to engage in conversations about challenging and divisive issues in a constructive manner, and avoid attacks, demonization and stereotyping. You will gain ideas and skills to engage others with differing viewpoints in ways that promote connection, community, caring and concern.
As increases in day school tuition continue to significantly outpace inflation, innovative schools and communities are making dynamic change in the field to address this critical need, and other challenges to making Jewish education affordable for all. This panel reviews the state of the field, looking closely at a multi-school pilot project in L.A., and the efforts underway nationally and locally that are changing the culture of Jewish day school to increase resources and drive sustainability. We'll explore community funds, endowments, blended learning, and interventions to address the squeeze felt by middle-income families.
How can funders of national programs and local community funders work more strategically with each other? The tensions that exist between the overlapping missions of funders with these different geographical focuses can be used to open up new lines of communication, new strategies for shared learning, and better leveraging of resources. This panel offers perspectives on models for cooperation and provides concrete suggestions for improved communication and collaboration. We'll hear about funder partnerships that worked--and some that didn't--and suggestions of mutually beneficial ways to better align the expertise and value each brings to the table.
While much of the current conversation in philanthropy is on strategic grantmaking, there is a growing movement of grantmakers who believe that responding to what communities say they need and strengthening organizations' capacity can achieve important, measurable, long-term results. Two very different foundations discuss their approaches to responsive grantmaking. Learn how to use these techniques to build capacity and sustainability of grantees through the use of core operating support funding, restricted capacity-building grants, and collaboration, as well as how to build trust with grantees, create reciprocal learning between foundations and grantees, and how to evaluate and measure the results.
Photographer Frederic Brenner’s newest project, “Israel: Portrait of a Work in Progress” brought 12 world-class photographers to Israel to create a unique portrait of the country’s multifaceted society. It rolls out this year with a thoughtful plan to spark complicated, nuanced conversations and reactions about Israel. This session previews the exhibit and launches a conversation of our own, about how funding the arts can be part of a funding strategy for issues such as Israel advocacy, social justice, and more.
The social norms of how young Jews engage with their identity and community, discussed in the morning’s plenary, point to a need for a 21st-century communal design. Sid Schwarz presents his vision and opens a dialogue with strong voices from the innovation and institutional sectors who have been successful in driving participation and engagement among the new generation.
In this challenging economy, working-class incomes have stagnated, and for many low-income wage earners, upward mobility seems like a vanishing prospect. This panel brings together experts in expanding workforce opportunity who will explore the impact of the current economy, gain an understanding of who is most affected and their needs, and review the creative programs, policy issues, opportunities and challenges to philanthropy in this field.
The Jewish startup boom of the past decade has yielded some high-potential organizations. What's the next step for these "post-startups"? How can we work to bring together the multiple elements that are needed for growth? This panel draws together experts from outside and within the Jewish community, including the team that prepared Moishe House for their recent rampup, to discuss models and recent research into scaling and sustaining nonprofits.
As Israel faces the growing threats of a nuclear Iran and a hostile Arab Spring, it must navigate around the global perceptions of these issues. This panel reviews present challenges with a focus on three different approaches going on outside the U.S. for advocating for Israel: changing Europe's political culture, finding new allies in other regions, and grassroots efforts at changing public opinion.
How healthy are the relationships you have with your grantees, and are you clear about how to manage them? What have you noticed about the internal functioning of your grantees and how do you address concerns constructively? Participants in this session will learn how to take a systemic view of the strengths and challenges of grantee relationship management. You will learn to diagnose and work with issues including mission alignment, role clarity, and conflict management. Exercises will deepen your understanding of your relationship to a grantee and you will explore a case study on how to enhance collaboration and effectiveness.
When crisis hits, our decisionmaking is not always as well-informed or strategic as it might be. What steps can foundations take to prepare their grantees—and themselves—for times of crisis or disaster? We’ll hear from U.S. and Israeli foundation leaders and field experts on the kinds of communications protocols, contingency planning, infrastructure building, training, and coordination efforts that can mitigate the potential effects of disaster and support response and relief efforts.
Please note: This session is closed to media.
In philanthropy, individuals, families and organizations are challenged to make critical decisions where the choice makes a significant difference in peoples’ lives—for example, choosing a particular target population or region for funding, selecting among multiple worthy organizations, deciding when and how to end support, or managing the tradeoff between providing less intense support to many or deeper support to few. What human and informational resources do you call upon to address these dilemmas? This highly participatory session will pose an interactive case study challenge and give participants the opportunity to wrestle with the issues from a number of perspectives. You also will have the opportunity to bring in dilemmas you face in your decision-making for some crowdsourced solutions.
Explore impact investing—a growing investing practice that seeks to achieve social and environmental impact as well as financial returns. We will discuss a broad range of impact investing topics, including socially responsible investing, private debt and equity investing, for-profit social enterprises and social impact bonds. Panelists will share their experiences in using impact investing techniques to move the dial on the philanthropic issues targeted by their respective foundations.
Israel and the U.S. each face similar challenges in their educational and workforce development sectors. Both systems are fraught with inequities and disparities, and suffer from antiquated models of teaching and learning, deteriorating student achievement, and a lack of capacity to meet future needs. Improving STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) capabilities are at the heart of both nations’ future economic and social success. This panel brings together funders interested in forging collaborative and leveraged strategies to reinvigorate the innovative and creative processes necessary to keep Israel and the U.S. strong and vibrant.
Some of the Jewish community’s most successful and beloved projects of recent years are offered free of charge to the end user. Large numbers of people take advantage of these programs, and research shows they offer a path to engagement in communal life. Nonetheless, there are challenging questions about the long-term consequences of "free". Today’s panel tackles these questions with a funders' perspective: who decides what is offered free, and are we comfortable with that? Is it good business or is it harming the Jewish nonprofit economy and ecosystem? Do we have appropriate follow-up mechanisms in place to move users from passive receivers to active searchers? Are we creating demand or reducing perceived value?
In the nuanced and complicated campus climate regarding Israel, few challenges have faced greater resistance to change than those involving faculty and campus administrators. How can funders help to create change in this environment, ensure that their funds achieve their goals, and not go astray? This session examines what funders need to know when making grants in this dynamic and challenging area. We’ll hear first-hand from funders, faculty members, veteran Israeli diplomats, and others as we explore innovative models (and potential pitfalls) for endowing faculty chairs, developing Israel Studies centers, engaging faculty and administrators, and discuss what strategies funders can and have employed to create positive change.
Several foundations have taken leadership roles in making their grantmaking practices more inclusive, as well as funding inclusion efforts. This panel brings together funders with experience in three areas of inclusion work—LGBT, gender, and people with disabilities—to share their experiences. We’ll hear what progress has been made and what obstacles remain to confront, look at points of commonality across the movements, and explore how you can apply these lessons to your own grantmaking.
While there are many ways to work to repair the world, when faced with world of grave poverty, hunger, and disease, many of us pursue work in international development. International grantmaking is like other grant making—only harder—and as funders, though we’re led by our hearts, our minds demand that good works be well conceived, effectively implemented and make an impact. In this workshop, three leaders in this field discuss the difficult questions they face, share how their organizations approach the specific challenges of international work, and reflect on what makes it uniquely “Jewish.”
Recent years have seen several efforts to develop innovative systems for reporting the performance, measuring the outcomes, and coordinating the efforts of many social enterprises within a field. By developing shared approaches to performance, outcome, or impact measurement across multiple organizations, funders who share goals can improve learning among grantees and funders alike as well as increase efficiency in grantee reporting. This session explores the benefits of different types of models of collaborative work around evaluation, the elements that make these systems successful, and explores one example in depth: GrapeVine, which links the silos of Jewish life in a community to maximize retention of Jews along their Jewish journey and offers opportunity for funders, agencies and organizations to make strategic decisions based on real data.
Arab citizens make up 20% of Israel’s population, yet they contribute only 8 percent of its GDP and constitute only 8 percent of public-sector employees. Today’s discussion brings together Israeli government, business and social-sector leaders to discuss top-down and bottom-up approaches to advance opportunities for social mobility among Israel’s diverse populations. The panel addresses the recent and unprecedented investments by the government in economic development for the Arab community; how Israeli entrepreneurs are working to grow the Arab business sector; civil society’s role promoting shared society; and gaps where philanthropic investment can make a meaningful difference.
