JOIN for Justice

Shana Tova from JOIN for Justice!

The New Year offers us a a time for reflection and recommitment during a busy season.

We are honored to count you as a part of the JOIN community. We wish you all the best that life can bring in the coming year — as we work together towards embracing new life, new hope and a more just world.

Happy New Year,

Karla Van Praag
Executive Director, JOIN

Chloe Zelkha is an alum of the 2013-2014 class of Jewish Organizing Fellows. Her JOIN placement found her working alongside teenagers at The Food Project – North Shore, where she supported youth interns in their work on food justice.

This summer, Chloe traveled with a Food Project youth leaders to a national conference in New Mexico. She wrote to us about her experience:

This summer, one of my awesome youth leaders Julia and I flew out to Albuquerque, New Mexico to scheme, strategize, connect, and share at Rooted in Community’s National Youth Summit. Rooted in Community (RIC) is a national network of young food movement leaders that empowers youth across the country to take up leadership in the struggle to change unjust food systems.

This year, RIC organized in solidarity with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, a worker-based human rights organization that fights for tomato farmworkers in Florida, to collaborate on an action at Wendy’s. Wendy’s is the current target of CIW’s Campaign for Fair Food, which demands that food retailers treat their workers with dignity — raising the wage one penny more per pound harvested, and ensuring humane farm labor standards — for example, eradicating sexual harassment in the fields, and guarding against obscene incidents of modern day slavery. The campaign is on fire! Agreements with eleven multi-billion dollar corporations including McDonald’s, Subway, Sodexo and Whole Foods have been secured — and now it’s Wendy’s turn. And youth are making their voices heard!

It was so powerful to see, in one day, so much intergenerational wisdom mobilized to take action! After a panel of elder activists sharing their inspiring stories of struggle and victory in organizing, an amped-up group of young people headed downtown to show the world what youth are capable of and what we care about.

Just the day before, Julia and I led a Food Project popular education workshop about the CIW campaign for some of the conference participants, sharing stories of farmworkers, working conditions, the history of the campaign, and what steps we can take to be allies. It was awesome to see people taking that information and translating it into signs, speeches, a letter delegation, and many young people’s first experience with chanting (“Wendy’s! Escucha! Estamos en la lucha!”) and The People’s Mic!

The energy — punctuated with drumming, cheering, and lots of love — was unmatched. Wendy’s, we’re coming for ya, and there ain’t no power like the power of the youth because the power of the youth don’t stop!

See more photos of the day’s action in the Rooted in Community Facebook album.

JOIN alum Rabbi Sara Luria wrote this week about lessons she has learned in her first year as director of ImmerseNYC. Here’s how we know she’s a JOIN alum:

Lesson #4: “Everything I do in my job is about developing relationships and building trust.” 

This article originally appeared on eJewish Philanthropy.

1 Year, 7 Lessons

By Rabbi Sara Luria

In 7th grade drama class, our teacher asked us to come up with adjectives that described our personalities, starting with the first letter of our first names. I chose “Sensitive Sara,” which was true, although not as much fun to say as “Jocular Jeremiah,” who, from what I can tell from our Facebook relationship, remains as jocular as ever.

Much more recently, at a lovely birthday dinner attended by some of my closest friends, I was affectionately dubbed, “radically sensitive.” Plus ça change, my friends know me well. Along with being radically sensitive, I’m also the founder of ImmerseNYC, a nonprofit start-up in the New York Jewish community. In my experience, founders are often told to have a “thick skin” and not “take things personally.” Ha.

I thought it might be helpful to share 7 lessons I have learned on the job in my first year as a full-time founder/executive director. I believe that there is not one characteristic that defines a great leader; in fact, I think the best we can do is learn how to harness our strengths and personality traits for good, so that we can be authentically ourselves as leaders, and work to create strong organizations from that rooted authenticity.

7 lessons:

1. ImmerseNYC’s volunteer leaders are our heroines and heroes; our organization exists and thrives because of them. We have 24 active mikveh guides who do incredible things, like hire a babysitter on a weeknight, in order to facilitate immersions. Our 9 advisory board members work hard because they care deeply about reclaiming this Jewish ritual and about inclusivity in our Jewish community. And then there are the facilitators and hosts of our salons who are so invested in building community that they pay for refreshments, open their homes, have countless calls and meetings with me to prep, and on, and on. I can truly never thank our leaders enough.

2. Measuring quantitative organizational impact, such as how many people have visited the mikveh with our guides or participated in one of our salons, is an important aspect of our work. However, for ImmerseNYC in our first year, we have chosen to focus primarily on the quality of the ImmerseNYC experience. We want every person who calls our office, emails our staff, interacts with a mikveh guide, attends a salon, or volunteers with us to feel cared for, listened to, and truly welcomed. That takes a lot of time and energy, and it certainly can’t be quantified. But it’s how we live out our organizational values every day, and I believe it’s one of the reasons why our ImmerseNYC community feels spiritually nourishing for our participants, and how we cultivate and retain such dedicated volunteer leaders.

3. I was able to create ImmerseNYC because one foundation was willing to invest in me, as a leader, and ImmerseNYC, as a project. Every time we receive a testimonial from someone who has had a powerful, transformative immersion, or who has connected to community through our salons, much of the credit is due to that foundation. The money they invest in us may not be a lot for them but it means the whole world to us, and everyone impacted by our work.

4. Everything I do in my job is about developing relationships and building trust. That applies to supervising staff, meeting with stakeholders, and engaging individual donors. In my experience, it takes time to build a relationship strong enough to make an “ask” for a financial gift. Which is, again, one of the reasons that the grants from the aforementioned foundation are so crucial to our work, since their funds “buy us time” to be able to cultivate the donor relationships that are so important to the long-term sustainability of ImmerseNYC.

Continue reading Sara’s article on the eJewish Philanthropy website.