JOIN for Justice

A message from our Executive Director, Karla Van Praag.

There is a hunger in our Jewish communities to work for social justice that is greater than you can imagine. Greater than I did, anyway.

When we came up with the idea to create a large-scale online course to teach Jews about the role of community organizing in creating social change, there were initially many doubters (including on our own staff).

Some organizer friends cautioned us about the significant challenges that would come with teaching organizing online, and encouraged us to stick to in-person training. Others said people are too busy to participate in a long-form course. Two-hour tastes are more realistic, given people’s busy lives and the prevailing “click here” culture. Keep it short and sweet, and don’t ask too much of people.

We care deeply about the quality of our programs, and about the impact they should yield, so these critiques gave us serious pause. We wanted to design our course Don’t Kvetch, Organize! to take the best of what an online course can provide and merge it with what is most powerful about learning community organizing.

So we decided to take these comments not as a rejection of the concept but as advice.
We worked for months to design a curriculum with stimulating content. We recruited luminaries in the field as Master Trainers, and found Course Instructors with years of organizing experience to support our students.

Nowadays we are told to water things down, that people are too busy to do commit more than the most minimal time to anything new.

But changing the status quo requires a serious commitment. So we decided to go big, and to ask participants to devote significant time, energy, and passion over seven full weeks to learning organizing and beginning to take action. We set a stretch goal of 150 students for the first course.

It turned out not to be a stretch. We had to close registration months before the final deadline, and have a growing waitlist for next time. Today, over 200 students are immersed in Week Four of Don’t Kvetch, Organize!

We can see from the way our course participants are grappling with content in the discussion forums and section meetings that people are learning and growing, challenging long-held assumptions about the roots of inequality, and re-committing themselves to acting powerfully for change in their communities.

We are realizing from all this feedback that we hit a nerve. And we are remembering one of the most important lessons of organizing: no one is too busy to do something new when it taps deeply into their self-interest, connects them to community, and makes them feel powerful enough to make real change.

We are grateful to everyone who took this risk with us: our funders, our supporters, our Master Trainers and Course Instructors, and of course each student dedicating their time to learning and growing with us.

I can’t wait to see what they will accomplish.

Rabbi Adam Baldachin, Seminary Leadership Project alum, wrote on eJewish Philanthropy this morning about his work organizing for justice in the East Ramapo School District.  His piece is excerpted below, and you can read the full piece here.  

As rabbis, we are trained to access the collection of texts that deal with the stuff of life. The law, narratives, interpretations, and inner yearnings that make up the Jewish tradition give us the background we need to do our holy work: to bring truth, meaning, justice, and empathy to anyone who will connect with us on their Jewish journeys. Yet when I began to work full time as a rabbi in Montebello, NY, I couldn’t have guessed where my training would lead me.

In my first week on the job, a local reporter asked my opinion about the crisis unfolding within the East Ramapo school district. Knowing nothing about the issue, I declined to comment. Instead, I began my justice work by holding one-on-one conversations and listening, as I learned while at JTS in a course taught by Meir Lakein of JOIN for Justice. So upon arriving at Montebello Jewish Center, I met congregants in my office, out for coffee or in their homes to hear their stories and find out what might motivate them to get involved in some issue that affected them, their community or society at large. The issue that was mentioned over and over again was the situation in the East Ramapo School District, which is located about three miles from our synagogue.

See the rest of the post here.  

In November, at the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism’s 2015 Convention, JOIN for Justice will launch an initiative to train clergy and synagogue lay leaders jointly in community organizing skills.

Seminary Project alumna and former staff member Rabbi Stephanie Ruskay was interviewed by Voices of Conservative Judaism about using a community organizing approach to transform synagogue life.  The interview is excerpted below, and you can see the full piece here.  

For a lot of synagogues the challenge is finding new leaders and volunteers. Is congregation-based community organizing a way to help with that?

Rabbi Stephanie Ruskay: Yes, because it’s all about developing and cultivating leaders and helping them act on the things that are most important to them in partnership with other congregants.

What’s different about this approach? What makes it effective?

SR: Sometimes in the Jewish community we’re afraid to talk about power or about self-interest. Community organizing involves a willingness to think about and discuss self-interest. It’s the idea that people really will work on something for a long time if they see it as in their self-interest and can articulate why. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

Can you explain that a bit more?

SR: Often with leadership opportunities at congregations, a person might think there’s a lot that needs to be done, so they’re going to go look for someone to help do it. And if you’re persuasive you can convince people to do things. But you can’t necessarily convince them to do things for a long time and in an effective way. With community organizing, it’s not about convincing people to do things you want them to do, it’s about understanding who they are, and what they care about, and how working together you can craft something that will help them act on the values they care about in the world.

What’s the process?

SR: It’s relational organizing, which means that relationships are at the center. So you need to get to know people. People set up one-to-one meetings, or house meetings with small groups, and at those meetings you get to know what moves people and what motivates them. You see what they might have energy to work on. Also, you come to know who some of the leaders in a community really are, which doesn’t necessarily mean the people who are already the leaders.

Why are these leaders not known?

SR: In shul, we might see people frequently, but we don’t know what’s actually going on for them, what they care about and what the challenges in their lives are. When you take the time to do that, people feel heard, and if they know you’re going to work with them, that you’re invested in their leadership and success, then they’re going to show up for you, especially when you’re working on something that’s of prime importance to them.

See the rest of the interview here.