The practitioner-activist takes risks to advance the field of Jewish education, said Harlene Winnick Appelman, Executive Director of The Covenant Foundation, is astute enough to avoid the pitfall of active inertia and to cheer, advocate and sometimes nudge for others to follow. And, the practitioner-activist envisions a landscape that has yet to evolve and is committed to nurturing it into existence.
During three days of programming and workshops, project directors from across the country connected, learned together and discussed how to create significant change by thinking and acting beyond the traditional boundaries and limitations of their own projects and disciplines.
The meeting began by examining the historic Freedom Struggle for Soviet Jewry, a watershed movement in American Jewish activism. A panel of Soviet Jewry activists who represented living history was moderated by Fred Lazin, Natan Visiting Professor, Taub Center for Israel Studies at New York University and Professor of Local Government at Ben-Gurion University. Panelists included Jerry Goodman, founding Executive Director, National Conference on Soviet Jewry; Glenn Richter, Co-Founder of the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry (1964); and Charlotte Gerber Turner, a community activist and board member of the National Conference on Soviet Jewry (1977-1982).
The panelists reflected on those moments of passion and action that drove them to stand up and leadin a manner they had never imagined. The diverse group of project directors, some of whom lived this history, and others of whom view it as a historical happening, sat spellbound as panelists described the American government’s change from indifference to support of a significant Jewish issue and the grassroots voices that drove it.
Next, the project directors reviewed current history as the groundbreaking originators of the Great Schlep, Mik Moore, Chief Strategy Officer at the Jewish Fund for Justice, and Ari Wallach, Founder and President of studioBenZion, described their vision, design and strategy for winning the State of Florida for presidential candidate, Barak Obama, in 2008. “The Great Schlep,” WAS an innovative approach charged by social networking, which encouraged grandchildren to urge their grandparents, Jewish seniors living in Florida, to vote for him.
The widely recognized campaign utilized an integrated communications strategy. Moore and Wallach created a tightly scripted email campaign and launched an audacious, irreverent, funny video featuring comedian, Sara Silverman. They timed the messages and video to run during Jewish holidays to maximize family interaction and conversation, and to get young adults communicating with their grandparents in Florida. Their persuasive media strategy also included setting up interviews with camera-friendly grandchildren and grandparents.
Moore said that influencing Floridian seniors depended on connecting highly motivated people to skeptical ones, and creating conversations to build constituencies. Once the movement began and gained traction, he said, “Everyone wanted to be on the bus.” The initiative was successful, Moore and Wallach said, because it played on Jewish sensitivities, basic family values, and encouraged engagement as Jews.
BBYO, the Jewish teen movement, was highlighted for using cyberspace to create effective change and motivate an activist agenda. Adam Bloom, International President of BBYO, described how the organization mobilized Jewish teens and their friends via social media to raise funds for Haitian earthquake relief.
The organization reached out to 35,000 teens across America through viral networking using Blackberry and iPhone links, and developed a Facebook group to promote one-on-one interaction and communication. Roughly 11,000 Jewish and non-Jewish teens responded to the online fundraising appeal. Although technology fueled this initiative, Bloom said, it was the personal contacts and connections that made this urgent campaign a success.
Sharing the narrative with outstanding examples of the practitioner-activist paradigm, Jonathan Schreiber, Director of Community Engagement for Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, demonstrated how the same strategies embedded in atypical commercial marketing cycle – recruitment, fundraising, and advocacy – are applicable to organizational projects and programs, and to an organization’s message itself. He said that like the activist models, each marketing challenge is about how personal need drives involvement and connection.
Completing the arc of the Project Directors’ Meeting was Ami Dar, Executive Director of Action Without Borders, the nonprofit organization that runs Idealist.org. “When I was young and trying to decide what to do with my life, I got really into this idea of how can we do more with all the resources that we have in the world,” he said. “I was 24 and I thought we, all of us, all six billion of us, have time, ideas, resources, then surely we could be doing more. . So the question was, how? How can we all work together better?”
Dar said he succeeded in creating Idealist as a networking hub for nonprofit organizations and job seekers, volunteers, and citizen activists from the right to the left. For Dar, Idealist is nothing short of an attempt to shift social paradigms with a little HTML. In the years the site has been online, more than a quarter-million people and 40,000 organizations have passed through its virtual gates.
When asked by one of the participants, “How is this Jewish?” Dar smiled and referred to David Ben Gurion, who credited his social activism not to Marx and Lenin, but to Jeremiah and Isaiah, the prophets. Today, mirroring Ben Gurion’s philosophy, Dar said he strives to help other people realize their dreams and make change that matters.
As does The Covenant Foundation and its grantee organizations.
