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.
Union organizer and JOIN alum Corey Hope Leaffer wrote recently for the Kolot Project blog, tackling personal and political issues: being a Jew in the labor movement, being in a multiracial family and looking forward to the birth of her new son. Corey worked with the North Shore Labor Council during her time with JOIN.
She writes:
“For the last 10 years I have worked professionally in the labor movement but I got active in worker rights when I was in college. As a child I attended Jewish day school and that is where I learned the treasures of my Jewish religion and culture.I attended Brandeis and my Jewish identity grew. After I graduated, I became a fellow at the Jewish Organizing Initiative Network (JOIN) where I worked at the North Shore Labor Council. That was an important step in bringing my Jewish values together with my commitment to the labor movement…
“I’ve been spending a lot of time lately thinking about new difficult situations I will soon be challenged with in life. In a few weeks, I will become a mother for the first time. My fiancée Zev and I are expecting a son any day now. Zev is black and Jewish and I am white and Jewish and we are both union organizers for SEIU. Our son will be multi-racial and he’ll be Jewish and he’ll grow up with his parents working in the labor movement. He will be born into a complicated world with a complicated and beautiful history from both sides of his heritage.”
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.
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.
On June 23, JOIN for Justice celebrated the graduation of our 2013-14 Jewish Organizing Fellows at Siyyum. JOIN’s Executive Director, Karla Van Praag, addressed the Fellows, their families and JOIN supporters. Her speech is below.
Good evening, my name is Karla Van Praag, I’m the Executive Director of JOIN for Justice and I too would like to welcome you to the Siyyum and graduation for the 16th class of the Jewish Organizing Fellowship.
Is anyone watching the World Cup? Coming from a soccer family myself and having played all through high school, I’ve been watching a lot—can you believe the end of the US Portugal game last night?! Who here saw it? Anyway, I’m thankful that one of my three children, my five-year old son Tavio, has caught the soccer bug. I often spend my Wednesday evenings at Football Club Revere , sitting on a field on a lawn chair, watching what can be described as a distant relative of a beautiful game.
Five-year-olds are old enough to understand the basics so it’s not entirely painful—they don’t use their hands, they all go in one direction, they try to stay inside the sidelines. And they all have the same focus—the ball—and also the same goal—well, the goal—and so what happens is they run to the ball, and often convene upon the ball, and then proceed to move amoeba-like as a unit around the field, looking like the hair-shaped metal filings on a Wooly Willy toy. It’s cute… and quite ineffective.
Why are they playing this way? It’s probably not to be cute. What message do they hear? Get the ball. Drive it to the goal. Score. So that’s what they all try to do. Even though, of course that clump of people trying to do the same thing generally assures that none of them will succeed at it. They are still in the process of learning that to achieve a group’s mission, you need to think about much more than yourself and your personal role. But they do learn, and I see it happening as I lift my gaze to the 7 and 9 and 11 year olds also having practice a little further away, who are passing more. It seems that as they get older they start to take up the right amount of space on the field; this is what allows the ball out of the huddled masses and into a successful drive towards the net.
How did Portugal tie the game? With seconds to go, Ronaldo, their superstar, highly acclaimed and highly paid striker, curled the ball to Varela, who headed it into the net. But, really, is that how they did it? What happened before Ronaldo made that fancy cross? What defender intercepted the ball, and made the first critical pass six plays earlier, changing not just possession, but the pace of the game? And where did that player come from, anyway? Who was working with him to hone his fielding skills? On a team, there is much more there than Ronaldo.
Organizers learn—often the hard way—to look beyond the people standing out front. Just as schoolchildren hear that all that matters in soccer is driving to the goal and scoring, they’re also taught that social change happens when a great, visionary person out front makes it happen. But that’s not true.
Schoolchildren may learn that Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus because she was tired one afternoon, or because she was an incredibly inspirational figure. But the truth is that she trained with peers at the Highlander Center in nonviolent resistance, where she developed relationships with allies to support the bus boycott, and where she gained the spiritual and emotional support to take a calculated personal risk that paid off in profound ways. There was a huge group of leaders that worked with her as her team, honing their strategy, building their power, all playing their roles, so that when the time came, they were able to execute a plan that would change the course of history for the rest of us.
There are a lot of leadership programs out there who focus on building up the leaders in the front, the charismatic charmer, the head of the pack, the one who tells everyone what is needed and how to get there. Yet, as crucial as it is to have the Ronaldo, at JOIN for Justice we recognize that Ronaldo only succeeds as part of a team that is crafted together, everyone playing their role to become something so much larger than the sum of their parts. JOIN trains organizers in that craft. JOIN is building the leader who brings out the leadership in others. JOIN is building the leader who can identify the talent, and help it grow into its potential. JOIN is building the coach who can pull together a team of players who work together as a unit. JOIN is building organizers.
And what is an important facet of this kind of leadership that we are focusing on tonight? If you are practicing collective leadership, it means recognizing that the answers to solving the problems you face don’t always come from the most confident voice, or the one with the highest degree, or the most powerful individual, or even yourself. An organizer, first and foremost, listens. An organizer makes room for others to discover themselves and bring the stories and experience they have into a public problem-solving space. Here at JOIN, we don’t think the world needs to develop more people who think they have all the answers—we can see how well that has worked in solving our most pressing social problems. Rather, it is only by stepping back to make the space for the voices that aren’t heard as much—the ones with the personal experience with the problems themselves – that we can create a new kind of team, with new strengths and new muscles. And although the leaders of these kinds of teams don’t have their name in lights or make the big bucks—sorry to all the Moms and Dads in the room—you will hear tonight how essential they are to making the change we all want to see happen and build the world we want to inhabit. Tonight is all about reflecting on who and what it takes to take up the right space on the field so that everyone can shine and win.
Before we get into the stories, a moment of bragging about the incredible people you are going to hear from tonight. Originally founded as the Jewish Organizing Initiative by Michael Brown (who is here tonight), JOIN for Justice has made the important investments in young adult Jewish leadership for social justice since 1998. JOIN’s model of experiential learning combined with reflection and community building, and of apprenticeships with Jewish and secular social change organizations, has become a model for other faith communities across the country and has significantly contributed to the capacity of countless organizations in Boston and beyond. Organizations see so much value in our Fellows that they return to JOIN year after year to participate in our program, and as proof of how valuable they become, the great majority are hired full time after their fellowship year is over, and this year is no exception.
We do a national search to find our Fellows, using talent scouts from across the country, who help us to locate exceptional individuals 21-30. Here is an incomplete overview of what these 12 individuals did over the last year. They met every Friday and at three additional weekend-long retreats to learn about the art and science of organizing, including intensive studies of power, anti-oppression, relationship-building, storytelling, and taking action. They presented case studies of what they were doing in their work and voluntarily exposed themselves to criticism and advice from their peers and experts. They met with mentors to help guide them, and did regular readings and written reflection.
Organizing requires asking others to take real risks, in some cases putting your job on the line, so you’d better be prepared to explain what’s in it for you. You can’t do that well if you don’t understand your own story of what brought you here. And so, while learning how to organize, these people also took on an additional challenge of understanding what Judaism had to do with their own story. They used Judaism as a mirror to understand their work, themselves, their families, and their communal history. They studied Jewish texts, history and traditions with Rabbis and educators. They also built their own Jewish community for support, to hold them up as they failed and made mistakes. They gathered monthly for Shabbat as a pluralistic community, testing the limits of their normal practice.
And as they did all this, at the same time, they held extremely challenging more than full time jobs, regularly putting themselves into uncomfortable situations where they did things for the first time. At their jobs, they achieved a lot: They secured more accessible and equitable public transportation, They organized for workers rights. They built coalitions working on fair funding for public education. They strengthened Jewish social justice communities. They fought for and won the highest state-wide minimum wage in the country.
In short, this was a rigorous, reflective, and intense year. The people standing before you have invested a lot of themselves to improve their capacity to take action in the world.
To the fellows, this year you’ve been making space for yourself to participate in the program, to invest in honing your ability to step up and step back. As every organizer and social change maker will tell you, it will be harder to create this space for yourselves as you go out dandelion style into the world. My wish for you is that as you dedicate yourself to your work, and you continue to skillfully create space for others, drawing in all the talent needed for your team, you also continue to leave space for yourselves to grow, and to use the community you have build here through JOIN. They will enable you to plant even more seeds, and together, score even more goals.
