JOIN for Justice

This letter from JOIN for Justice Executive Director Karla Van Praag was shared this December with the JOIN network. 

JOIN for Justice’s mission: Build a powerful field of Jewish leaders capable of effectively organizing for justice, both inside and outside Jewish communities in the US. But what does that look like when you are one of those leaders?

Colin Killick grew up going to protests with his parents. He always knew he wanted to make a difference in the world, but he wasn’t sure how. Then, as he says, after graduating college, “I found JOIN for Justice, which redirected the course of my entire life.”

In 2015, as a Jewish Organizing Fellow, Colin worked as a community organizer for Disability Policy Consortium (DPC). Using his learnings from JOIN, and in partnership with a JOIN alum at Boston Center for Independent Living, Colin organized a leadership team working on a campaign to provide affordable housing to low-income people with disabilities. The team won BIG: leveraging $1 million more in state funding for affordable housing for low-income people with disabilities, the biggest increase in over 15 years! Since then, DPC’s organizing—carried on by JOIN Fellows—has won $11 million in new dollars to support housing for people with disabilities in Massachusetts.

“Because of our partnership with JOIN, organizing is now the heart of what DPC does to affect political change,” says Colin, who is now leading DPC as its Executive Director with a team of three organizers, all JOIN Fellows and alums. 

This is a story about how our training has impacted the disability community in Massachusetts. But it is also a story about how the disability community has changed us at JOIN.

While our Fellows were having impacts on the broader disability community, they were also supporting JOIN in better incorporating a disability focus into our organizing work. We know that those who experience injustice most sharply and urgently, in and outside of Jewish communities, must be at the center of efforts for social change. And our Fellows have consistently encouraged us to live more fully into this value in our programs.

These Fellow-led conversations played a crucial role in what eventually would become the Empower Fellowship, an initiative within the Jewish Organizing Fellowship for Jews who identify as people with disabilities. In addition to our general organizing curriculum, Empower Fellows engage in training to support them as disabled Jewish organizers.

Lior Gross is a Fellow in this inaugural year of Empower. At a young age, they felt a strong connection to the more-than-human world, recognizing the interconnectedness of all life. This sparked interest in climate organizing efforts in high school and college.

One night in college, Lior was walking outside the library with their organizing mentor. Their mentor asked, “Have you asked yourself whether you want to be powerful, and what it will take to get there? In order to be powerful, you have to bring your whole self.” This idea drove them to realize how important it was to claim their Jewish identity while doing justice work, which allowed them to be more authentic in their organizing, and also led them to JOIN.

The Empower Fellowship now offers Lior the opportunity to explore what it means to identify as disabled, and how to strengthen their work and leverage the power that comes with showing up fully as a disabled organizer. “It’s crucial in our movements to center leadership of the people most impacted,” says Lior. “I don’t know what other opportunities exist where I could learn about disabled Jewish organizing in robust ways to allow me to step into my power as an organizer. This Fellowship affirms the idea that you can be a disabled Jewish organizer and be better at what you do for it.”

The Empower Fellowship is transforming organizations both inside and outside of the disability field. Lior’s placement organization, Indivisible MA, is hosting a conference to engage people across MA for the 2020 election. Through Lior’s efforts, this is the first time Indivisible MA is working to make the conference accessible. Lior says, “Literally opening doors so everyone can participate is powerful and important.”

This is what we do at JOIN, and why I am so proud to work for this organization. We provide ground-breaking opportunities so that our program participants can tap into their power as organizers and work towards a more just world. When our leaders have the resources they need to succeed as organizers, we are all stronger for it.

JOIN will continue to do bold, innovative work to promote justice in the coming year. But we can’t do this without your support. I’m asking you today to support JOIN so that leaders like Colin and Lior have the opportunities, training, and networks they need to succeed in making a difference. Please consider supporting JOIN for Justice today.

Thank you for your ongoing commitment to our work. 

Give your end-of-year gift today!

Best,
Karla Van Praag

Executive Director, JOIN for Justice

Learn more about the Empower Fellowship below!

For a visual description of the video and more resources about disability and organizing, please click here.

When I was recently asked to do a community organizing training about one-to-ones for a Jewish organization, I was both enthusiastic and apprehensive. I knew a bit about the organization, but did not have a great sense of who would be my audience that day. I had no doubts, though, that I would be able to deliver a superior training, thanks to the incredible resources, support, and training I’ve received from JOIN for Justice over the years. And I was right – the training I led for this organization was hugely impactful for them, and I attribute this to the relational organizing skills I learned through JOIN. 

My involvement with JOIN for Justice began in 2014 when I joined the Seminary Leadership Project, continued as I took their online course Don’t Kvetch, Organize! the following year, joined the Strategic Planning Committee, and last year served on the Advisory Committee for the Empower Fellowship for Jews with Disabilities, a particular passion of mine (currently accepting applications!). If that wasn’t enough, this Fall I became a JOIN for Justice board member.  

Through all my learning and involvement at JOIN, the skill of building relationships through one-on-one conversations has been the most impactful in my work for justice. I use this skill nearly every day in the work that I do. This is such an important way of interacting with people because so much of who we are is rooted in story, if we don’t get to know each other and build trusting relationships, we won’t be able to build a powerful movement. And we need a powerful movement. Especially as a Rabbi, I have a particular responsibility to be in relationship with many constituencies, and my learning with JOIN has given me the tools and space to be in relationship with many different Jewish communities in my work for justice. 

I believe JOIN is an exceptional organization in the Jewish community because we hold a unique position in providing Jewish organizing trainings to a wide variety of constituencies. We need Jewish leaders equipped with the tools they need to be part of our collective work towards justice, which is exactly what JOIN has provided me. 

But even further, and on a more personal level, I am proud to be part of JOIN because we have chosen to invest deeply in cultivating the talents and passions of organizers with disabilities through the Empower Fellowship. This is just one example of our commitment at JOIN to go deep where few organizations are. 

I invite you to join me in supporting an organization that has given so much to me as an individual organizer and catalyzes Jews across the country to work on issues that matter to them.

Please consider an end-of-year gift to JOIN today. 

Best,

Dru Greenwood lives in Massachusetts, and signed up for the 2019 course Don’t Kvetch, Organize! to support her work at Temple Israel and with the Greater Boston Interfaith Organization. JOIN talked with Dru a few weeks after the course ended to share her experience in the course.

Learn more about the course!

There’s nothing better than this course for synagogue leaders. It speaks with a Jewish voice and speaks to live issues in the interfaith organizing world, about how to speak with Jewish voice and authenticity. That particular focus is what I found really unique about Don’t Kvetch, Organize!

What I was hoping to get out of the course was a deeper understanding and practice of organizing. I’m working with the Greater Boston Interfaith Organization. We had just finished a major action, starting with a listening campaign in the spring and then serious actions in late August and right before the 2018 election. The Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey came to our action and received a blessing from 1,400 people, all raising their hands and sending her off as the people’s attorney to fight for affordable healthcare on behalf of the people of Massachusetts. When the deal was finally struck, her chief of staff told our lead people that they had put strictures in place that saved Massachusetts consumers more than $1 billion over 7 years.

Everyone took a breath after the fall action. It was after this action that several of our core team members took the JOIN course together. It was exactly the right place for us to be. In the spring 2019, we were going to devote organizer and clergy leadership time to bringing in more congregations and organizations with a focus on people of color, immigrants, low and middle income people. In  the meantime during winter 2019, our main goal is to strengthen the organizing capability of the existing member organizations and that’s exactly what this course did.

I thought that the structure of the course was brilliant. I really appreciated the mix of virtual Zoom meetings and the readings and the videos. I’m not used to learning in that way, and I thought that was very effective.

The breadth and the approach to content was great. I know a number of people who made some of the tapes – Rabbi Jonah Pesner and Cheri Andes were wonderful, and I learned stuff about their actions on healthcare that I hadn’t known. It offered really helpful perspectives. It’s so much more tangible when you see the video of someone talking about a campaign; it comes alive.

Now that the course is over our synagogue core team has taken on a practice of doing one-to-ones. We each made a commitment to do a particular number each month—together it comes to 22 one-to-ones each month. At the beginning of each meeting we say how many we’ve done, and so far a month and a half after the course we’ve done over 50. It’s a cultural shift because we’re taking the practice of organizing so seriously, and we’ve taken on more responsibility ourselves.

This course is so important for helping us as Jews learn to be effective organizers and to really make a difference. The framework enabled us to understand why one-to-ones on an ongoing basis as a practice are so important to our effectiveness. And also how to talk about why this matters to each of us, like why you are doing work on affordable housing even though you personally have a place to live. That’s the story I try to tell–why this is so important to do–and the course gives you the tools to do it through a Jewish lens.

Learn more about the course!

Rickie Kashdan lives in New Jersey, and signed up for our 2019 Don’t Kvetch, Organize! course as a member of the Reform Jewish Voice of NJ, which is an affiliate of the Religious Action Center. JOIN talked with Rickie a few weeks after the course ended to share her experience in the course.

 What was your biggest hesitation about signing up for Don’t Kvetch, Organize!?

I don’t think I had any hesitation, maybe a little bit about having time. I was mainly excited about having the opportunity to focus my attention on community organizing. I had participated in JOIN for Justice’s ROAR training in person a few years ago, and that was very exciting.

What were you hoping to get out of the course?

I was hoping to gain confidence in my ability to work with communities. I’ve done quite a bit of community organizing but not from my Jewish heritage perspective, and I was looking to get some grounding in organizing from that perspective. Specifically, I’ve been active in my Reform Jewish movement’s statewide organization that’s part of the Reform Action Center (RAC) and I was looking to get more skill to build things around the state.

What did you discover from taking Don’t Kvetch, Organize!?

I was really bowled over! The course was a paradigm shift for me, many paradigm shifts. Some of it was at the very beginning of the course, the piece of thinking about root work vs (or in addition to) direct service activities, which has been an issue in my own congregation. I was excited to have a model for why I was frustrated just doing what people have called social action, to understand why it was frustrating to me that we were giving food to hungry people, when I want to also do policy, root cause work. It was like, “Oh, that’s what that is!”

The many stories as part of the trainings in the course were helpful, and the ideas around not just doing activities, but actually creating change. I felt a little bit of, “Oh, all I’ve been doing is activities all these years, oh no!” Not that that’s totally true, but that’s how it felt. So much of the time people have wanted something that they can say, “We did this, that was an activity we did.” I’m starting to recognize that if it’s not part of the bigger strategic plan, then are we really making the sustained change that we’re looking for? Maybe not!

Another really important piece for me was really focusing on community organizing as building change through building relationships. In my mind that’s the most key thing for me. It helped me look at how I was doing that and reaching out to congregations and building sustained relationships with people that can then be fostered into long term supportive connections and relationships.

It happened that the course timeframe worked really well with the Reform Jewish Voice of New Jersey advocacy day in our state capital in Trenton, and I saw relationship building there as well. In previous advocacy days, I had gone in to our local assembly people and they had not always been willing to meet with us. We had been able to meet with them at other times but not on the advocacy day. This year one of the Senators and the assembly person that was there made a point of meeting with us. That’s because I’ve been building relationships with them. They knew who we were and wanted to meet. One of them spoke with us for over an hour, because we were listening so intently, and he talked about his personal struggles.

What did you enjoy most about the course?

I really liked the videos, the stories,. seeing examples gave me both a mix of a lot of hope and also a feeling, “Could I really be part of such a big campaign?”

Marshall Ganz really speaks to me; it was good to have an opportunity to get to hear him in the videos. The videos of Meir explaining in very concrete terms the nuts and bolts of organizing for success and for change also was a highlight for me.

I loved the challenge of having to post in the discussion forum because it’s not something I do, and it is a goal of mine to learn to write out my thinking and put it out there. I felt like, “Ahh, now I have to do it!” Getting to have the online conversations with people. I love having a buddy, we’re still in contact, that made it more real. I would say the office hours were also really useful.

 If your best friend was on the fence about signing up, what would you tell them?

I would tell them it is fully worth it to spend the time to allow yourself to focus on effective organizing. It allowed me to have so many conversations and share my thinking while I was doing it. It was a very big growing experience. I have no regrets.

Learn more about the course!

Fran Zamore lives in Maryland, and signed up for our 2019 Don’t Kvetch, Organize! course as a member Jews United for Justice, in order to learn how to be a more effective activist. JOIN talked with Fran a few weeks after the course ended to share her experience in the course.

Learn more about the course!

If you’re thinking about taking the course, trust the process and jump in!  Just do it. I found the course valuable. You might get something entirely different out of it than you expect, but you’ll definitely get something. It’s all around your own growth so you can then make thoughtful decisions about how you want to proceed in helping repair this very needy world.

Part of what I’ve been noticing about myself is that as we’re living in this awful time in our history the only way that I can get up in the morning is by ratcheting up my meditation practice and by being part of the solution. I have a sign on my refrigerator that says “life begins at the end of your comfort zone.” Even though I thought this course would be a little nerve wracking, I knew I had to learn about organizing theory and tactics so that I can be more useful.

I discovered a lot of things in the course. I discovered I have good instincts and I can trust my instincts. I discovered language for stuff that I knew but didn’t know how to put language to well. I discovered that I don’t necessarily have the drive to do the things I thought I was interested in doing, but that there are other ways to plug in. It was very exciting to me to hear the richness of the conversation and the incredible thinking of the participants and the teaching material. It gave me a lot of hope—gives me a lot of hope.

I feel a greater sense of confidence. I’m a much keener observer. Other benefits include deepening some of my relationships because of people I know who participated in the program, and a willingness to stick with stuff even when it gets sloggy. I have a real appreciation now of how this kind of work isn’t one and done, this is ongoing.

Learn more about the course!