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Joshua Venture relaunches

By Jacob Berkman · November 2, 2009

Joshua Venture, the incubator of innovative Jewish projects that helped found such organizations as JDub, Heeb, Sharsheret and Storahtelling, has been revived after a four-year hiatus.

The incubator, which will now be known as The Joshua Venture Group, will recruit 8 fellows for its first two-year cohort. The fellows will receive two years of seed funding at $40,000 each, as well as mentoring.

The group has secured five years of funding for core operations from the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation, the Lippman Kanfer Family Foundation, the Nathan Joshua Venture Group, Cummings Foundation, and the Stanford and Joan Alexander Foundation and remains committed to the goal of revitalizing and enhancing Jewish communities, according to a press release it issued.

The group has also relaunched its Web site.

Nonprofit and for-profit ventures that are younger than 5 years old and have budgets of under $500,000 are eligible to apply for the fellowships. Applications for the 2010-2012 cohorts are available at www.joshuaventuregroup.org; Fellows will be announced in April 2010. Here’s the press release with more details.

Paying for programs—and the studies that love them

By Jacob Berkman · November 2, 2009

Last week I filed a story on the new Birthright study, and noted that the findings were serving as key plank in the organization's fund-raising push:

Birthright Israel is hinging a major fund-raising push on a new study that says the program, which sends young Jews on free 10-day trips to Israel, has a major impact on Jewish continuity.

The study, released Monday by Brandeis University’s Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies, found that those who participated on Birthright trips are more likely to have stronger connections to Israel, raise their children as Jews and belong to a synagogue than their peers who have not made a Birthright trip.

Titled "Generation Birthright Israel: The Impact of an Israel Experience on Jewish Identity and Choices," the study is based on interviews with some 1,200 young people who applied for Birthright trips between 2001 and 2004 -- two-thirds of whom went on the trips, the rest whose applications were denied. The survey compared the answers of the two groups.

Of the 500 or so interviewed who are now married, 72 percent who made the trip married Jews, while 46 percent of those who did not married Jews. This means that Birthright participants were 57 percent more likely to marry within the faith, according to Len Saxe, the head of the Cohen Center and the researcher who oversaw the survey.

A few more thoughts (that you could have read last week, if you were subscribed to The Fundermentalist's weekly newsletter) ... Birthright's most vocal philanthropic boosters -- Charles Bronfman, Lynn Schusterman and Michael Steinhardt -- all were at the news conference last week to make fund-raising pitches (as was Michael Bohnen, who runs Sheldon Adelson's foundation). And some of them also have been hammering home the message in well-timed opinion pieces citing the new study.

Does such a coordinated campaign, with the same funders backing the project and the research, risk undermining the credibility of the final study?

Even Saxe acknowledged to The Fundermentalist that he wishes the funders had waited a couple of weeks before using the study in their pitches.

The goal here isn't to pick on Birthright, because every Jewish survey is used ultimately by some organization to push policy and raise money. And as some researchers have whispered to me even before the new Birthright campaign, in general the lines between the funding and the research seem to have become increasingly blurred.

It's an issue that we will be looking into in the coming weeks.

As for Saxe and Birthright officials, they have gone out of their way to address any questions about the credibility of their study. At JTA's offices Tuesday, Saxe said that as a tenured professor at Brandeis, he felt absolutely no pressure to find certain results to placate his funders. The report lists half a dozen noted independent sociologists and researchers who also reviewed the methodology and findings of the study.

"My concern is how people will use the report," Saxe said, though he did acknowledge that "I wish that people hadn't started talking about funding for two weeks. I wish they had talked about education."

Besides, he said, pressure from philanthropists is no big deal. As a Congressional Science Fellow, Saxe conducted research in 1983 that he says helped prove the invalidity of lie detector tests.

"When the CIA doesn't like the results of your research," he said, "that is pressure."

The Birthright Foundation pulled off another nifty move in vouching for the validity of the survey: It had Steven M. Cohen -- a Jewish sociologist and researcher at New York University who has clashed with Saxe frequently and loudly -- to weigh in on the report. Despite their previous debates, Cohen was at the Oct. 26 news conference to vouch for Saxe's research.

Given the chance to respond to the report officially just after the Brandeis man presented his findings, Cohen said that he had interrogated Saxe's findings and, "from what little one can tell, they check out and make sense."

While Cohen and Saxe have butted heads often over how to respond to intermarriage, the report confirms that there is a "race between intermarriage and Birthright," Cohen said in front of about 100 reporters and philanthropy officials gathered at the Brandeis House in Manhattan. "I said I agree."

After the event, Cohen told me that he also supported the way the research was being used in a direct effort to promote a specific policy (higher funding for Birthright).

"Should social science be used for policy purposes? Yes. I'm an engaged intellectual," Cohen told JTA.

While Cohen said that researchers must do their work in a vacuum and be honest about their results, they can use the results to push an agenda.

"I have no objections," he said. "Intermarriage is a problem. Israel needs support. Why shouldn't I lend my voice to it?"

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Landing Obama and Brin

By Jacob Berkman · November 2, 2009

I filed a report last week tying together the Jewish community's to big "gets": Barack Obama and Sergey Brin:

NEW YORK (JTA) -- The relative calm that annually settles in over the Jewish nonprofit world during the High Holidays season ended with a bang this week, as the Jewish communal world landed two big gets.

President Obama agreed to speak next month at the General Assembly of the Jewish Federations of North America to be held in Washington -- his first speech as president to a Jewish audience. And one of the country’s richest men, Google co-founder Sergey Brin, made his first major charitable gift to a Jewish organization.

Both developments provide a boost to a Jewish philanthropic world facing tough times.

Brin, the 36-year old programming whiz who is worth $15.3 billion according to the recently released Forbes 400 list, announced Sunday that he would give $1 million to the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, one of the aid groups that helped his family when they emigrated from the Soviet Union to the United States 30 years ago.

The announcement, made on the 30th anniversary of the Brin family’s arrival in America, came as a welcome surprise to a Jewish nonprofit world that has been speculating for years on whether or not the Google co-founder would become engaged philanthropically in the Jewish world as he ramps up his giving.

For the Jewish Federations, which recently changed its name from United Jewish Communities, landing Obama could provide a boost to a North American charitable network coping with sagging fund-raising campaigns and other significant challenges.

Read the full story.

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Weinberg foundation to announce $100 million in grants.

By Jacob Berkman · November 2, 2009

The country’s largest Jewish-focused foundation, the Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Foundation, will announce roughly $100 million in grants at its annual public meeting in Baltimore Nov. 4.

The foundation will surely give a large percentage of those gifts to Jewish organizations.

Though $100 million is still a lot of money, the foundation before the recession had estimated that it would be giving out up to $25 million more than that this year, as I reported here this summer. Last year the foundation gave out $106 million. And while it did accept new grant applications starting in August, after taking a hiatus from new applications, the majority of the money the foundation will grant out is most likely going to come from multi-year commitments it had made before 2009.

From the Weinberg Foundation’s press release:

By making grants of approximately $100 million during the past year, The Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Foundation has continued to secure its position as one of the major American private funders for the benefit of financially disadvantaged individuals.

• After a several month hiatus in the receipt of Letters Of Inquiry (LOI), the first step in the grant application process, the Foundation’s “mailbox” was opened during August 2009. The result was a deluge of over 1,100 LOI’s received during that one month.

• In July, the Weinberg Foundation hosted its third annual Employee Giving Program event. $180,000 was awarded to 18 nonprofits.

• Since April 2009, The Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Foundation Family and Informal Caregiver Support Program RFP has awarded 14 grants totaling $8,184,145 to provide support for innovative and evidence-based community initiatives and projects that help family and friends assist low- and moderate-income, community dwelling older adults in maintaining their independence and quality of life. The grants were made to organizations in California, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Maine, New Hampshire, New York, Pennsylvania and Texas.

• Launched in December 2007, the Foundation initiated the Maryland Small Grants Program (MSGP) to help eligible nonprofits more easily and efficiently apply for a grant. Nonprofits are required to complete a simple, five-page proposal. In most cases it takes only 50 days for applications to be processed and funded. The response to the Maryland Small Grants Program has been overwhelming. The Foundation has awarded $10,463,450 to 181 nonprofits across the state since the program began less than two years ago.
 

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JPost: Silverman and Manning look at overseas funding and young people before GA

By Jacob Berkman · November 2, 2009

In his run-up to the GA, to be held next week in Washington, the Jerusalem Post’s Haviv Rettig spoke with the Jewish Federations of America’s top professional and lay leader, Jerry Silverman and Kathy Manning.

The story covers the federations’ plight in broad strokes. Silverman and Manning both say that the federation needs to rethink itself, from a revamping of the funding relationship between the American Jewish community and the federations’ overseas partners – the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and the Jewish Agency for Israel – to integrating young people and the organizations they run into the federation world.

Rettig writes:

AMONG THE first acts Silverman wants to lead in the federation system is a rethinking of the federations' priorities outside the US.

"We need to clarify with our federations what our mission is overseas," he says. Once, the federations were a pillar of Israel's survival. "In 1948, US Jews sent $250 million to Israel, when the entire state budget was just $500m.," notes Silverman.

The circumstances have changed, but the principle hasn't. "World Jewry still needs to have an important connection to Israel today," he insists. 

As for young people:

ONE OF American Jewry's most pressing problems is ensuring that a new generation of young Jews grows up with the same charitable and communal commitments of their predecessors.

To do this, says Silverman, federations have to "communicate with an iPod culture that doesn't look at the world the way we do. We grew up listening to entire record albums start to finish. These 18 to 30 year olds, sometimes called the 'odyssey group,' only listen to the songs they want, only download what they want to hear."

This youth culture means American Jewry will need new ways of plugging into communal life. In Silverman's words, "there have to be many paths for entering this tent." The good news, he adds, is that many federations are already leading the way.

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