Bess Beller-Levesque, community organizer with Toxics Action Center, and JOIN alum from 2012-2013, this March organized the 27th annual Local Environmental Action Conference, a day-long day of training on environmental organizing, which brought together 325 people from all across New England. The conference at Northeastern University featured a keynote address from Robin Chase, the co-founder of ZipCar, and workshops on topics ranging from environmental justice to local food and the new sharing economy. Here she presents an award to two Public Health experts recognized for their work during the conference’s award ceremony. 
Youth Jobs Rally Turns Out Over 1,000 Teens
Dylan Lazerow and Dan Gelbtuch organized with the Youth Jobs Coalition, a statewide advocacy group, and brought together 1,000+ teens to march on the statehouse for youth jobs funding on Thursday, February 20, 2014. The action received over 50 local and national press hits as far as Alaska and Texas in addition to stories in the Boston Globe, in the Boston Herald, on WBUR, Univision, NECN and on Fox 25. Eight additional JOIN alumni and current fellows turned out to support the teens.
Shout out to 15-year-old organizer for the Youth Jobs Coalition, Angela Ojimba, who represents for the Youth Jobs Coalition on Live TV: Click here to see video.
Posted in Alumni At Large, From the Field, Our News, Success Stories
Comments Off on Youth Jobs Rally Turns Out Over 1,000 Teens
Building community with JOIN for Justice
By Rabbi Adam Baldachin
Having recently graduated from the Jewish Theological Seminary, working as a pulpit rabbi comes with its challenges. I find myself often doing things I had previously only seen mentors do or even just heard about or imagined myself doing. Since the summer, I have developed and ran community programs, offered performance reviews to employees, organized a task force to develop a new initiative, and utilized the passionate visions of the membership.
Despite my lack of experience, it is my skills as a community organizer which have been utilized in almost every part of the job. As a rabbinical student, I participated in a seminary leadership course with JOIN for Justice, taught by Meir Lakein. Among other skills I learned, I developed the ability to lead a community by focusing on the development of people and how to help my community develop a common mission and act on it.
One of the challenges I have experienced in implementing some of my ideas as an organizer is finding the time and venue to teach the organizing skills to my lay leaders. Having advocates and leaders of an organizing initiative makes it much easier to accomplish. Luckily, JOIN recently paired up with SYNERGY, and UJA- Federation of NY and co-presented alongside Dr. Ron Wolfson, author of Relational Judaism and leaders from local synagogues to share strategies for building strong communities that prioritize interpersonal connections over transactional interactions.
These trainings took place on Sunday and Monday, February 23-24, 2014 in three different venues, including in Westchester, at Beth El Synagogue Center, on Long Island at Mid-Island Y JCC, and in Manhattan at UJA-Federation. Dr. Wolfson first led a discussion about transforming our synagogues into relational and welcoming communities. We shared and were inspired by ideas to show our congregants we care and shared best practices for how to engage participants in a relevant and meaningful way that draws on their skills and passions.
From there, we were took part in a training led by Jeannie Appleman, the Seminary Leadership Project Founder and Trainer. Jeannie told her story, explaining how she entered into the world of organizing and where her passions lay. She then taught us the benefits of organizing a community and how to lead a parlor meeting.
We then broke into individual groups, each meeting with about eight participants, comprised of a facilitator, a note taker, and time keeper, and shared with one another a time when we took a risk. Even without knowing each other beforehand, the members of the group opened up to each other about difficult moments they faced and the choices they made which greatly impacted the journeys of their lives.
The personal stories transformed our group from a class on how to run a parlor meeting to a powerful experience of sharing who we are in a deep way and empowering us to recreate the experience elsewhere. Each participant left the training prepared to bring the passion and the rules of implementation to their communities. As a facilitator, I was thrilled to help to create a meaningful dialogue with new friends, and I left, my own passions rekindled to connect with my congregants on a deeper level and to inspire those conversations between all members of my community.
Posted in Alumni At Large, From the Field, General, Seminary Project
Comments Off on Building community with JOIN for Justice
Growing a Garden, Seeding a Movement
By Davida Ginsberg
This article was originally posted on The Jew and the Carrot on February 19th 2014.
Davida Ginsberg is a Boston-based community organizer and food justice activist. She is an alum of the JOIN for Justice Jewish Organizing Fellowship and a leader of the Moishe Kavod Jewish Social Justice House’s Farm to Shul Team.
Rabbi Noah Farkas, highlighted in this article, is an alum of the Seminary Leadership Project and is a JOIN Board Member.
What is the purpose of a community garden? A few weeks ago, I would have said that I knew the answer to this question: that a community garden’s purpose is to nourish people with healthy food and to subvert a corrupt system by providing an alternate model.
However, at this year’s Hazon Food Conference at Isabella Freedman Jewish Retreat Center, Rabbi Noah Farkas challenged me to imagine the larger impact community gardens could have in creating a more just food system across lines of race and class. He pushed me to question how community gardens can lead us not just towards rejecting the system, but also changing the system itself.
While community gardens are popping up across the country, there are still many people without enough healthy food on the table. At the food conference, we watched the documentary A Place at the Table and learned how a single mother earning minimum wage became ineligible for food stamps but was still unable to afford enough food to feed her children. We also learned firsthand from workers and activists within the food industry that people who grow, transport, and sell food are disproportionately food insecure because they don’t earn enough; indeed 6 of the 10 worst paying jobs in the country are within the food system.
While community gardens certainly help provide food to those that don’t have access, planting gardens alone will not change this wealth inequality nor will it end chronic hunger. So what else do we need to be doing?
In order to truly fight for food justice, we need to talk about how food insecurity is inextricably tied to unjust wealth distribution: to low wages, tax breaks for the rich, and cuts to food stamps, to name a few. Ending hunger goes beyond bringing local produce to a food pantry; it is also about advocating for a radical redistribution of wealth that will give everyone a sense of autonomy and choice in putting food on the table.
The good news is that the organized Jewish 
community is already hard at work on this! Mazon: A Jewish Response to Hunger not only provides grants to food banks across the country, but also encourages asking elected officials to prevent cuts to food stamps. Jews United for Justice, based in Washington, DC, is working to raise the minimum wage in Maryland. Bend the Arc: A Jewish Partnership for Justice is advocating for a tax fairness campaign in California and a nationwide minimum wage campaign for people in the caregiver profession. This brief overview doesn’t even include the many individuals within the Jewish community, such as Lisa Levy, Director of Policy, Advocacy, and Organizing at the New York City Coalition Against Hunger, who are deeply committed to anti-hunger work in various organizations around the country.
Tackling systemic issues may seem much more daunting – and perhaps less directly impactful – than growing carrots and kale. To be clear – I’m not saying we should stop growing food to focus solely on systemic issues. Planting community gardens and broader food redistribution efforts impacts millions of lives on a daily basis. Rather, I am challenging us to think creatively about how we can do both.
Rabbi Farkas has already begun to pave the way. He suggests that community gardens can also serve as town centers, places where we can come together across lines of race and class to learn about and advocate for a more just and resilient food system. Bringing this idea to life, Rabbi Farkas founded Netiya, an interfaith partnership organization that engages communities across Los Angeles to cultivate gardens not only to donate the produce, but also to build community power to fight for food justice.
We don’t need to do this work alone, and in fact, our strength and resilience as a community can empower us to make change. If you are part of a community garden, what would it look like to begin to incorporate food justice? If not, what are the “town centers” already within your community that could bring people together around these issues? Together, let us ask: what can we, as Jews, uniquely contribute to the food justice movement?
I am ready to take action! How can I get involved?
• Advocate for anti-hunger legislation and policies! The New York City Coalition Against Hunger has resources for how to take action on current campaigns.
• The Welcome Table: learn about and advocate for restaurant worker’s rights.
• The Food Chain Workers Alliance: Learn about and advocate for food industry worker’s rights, including fair wages and earned sick time.
• Stay tuned for the Hazon Food Justice Program Guide, which will provide more ideas to involve and engage your community!
• Join the Jewish Food Justice Movers and Shakers Facebook page!
Posted in Alumni At Large, From the Field, General, Success Stories, Thinking Out Loud
Comments Off on Growing a Garden, Seeding a Movement
Organizing in Shul: ‘Scrapbook’ connects worshipers to prayer
White Meadow Temple creates siddur rooted in members’ memories
This article was originally posted in the New Jersey Jewish News on February 12th 2014.
Rabbi Benjamin Adler is an alum of JOIN’s Seminary Leadership Project, which provides rabbinical, cantorial and education students in all denominations at seminaries across the country with organizing and leadership development training, opening opportunities for students from various seminaries and denominations who are interested in organizing to impact the Jewish community and the world around them.
Picture: Showing off their new scrapbook siddur are White Meadow Temple members and clergy, from left, Stu Lefkowitz, Rabbi Benjamin Adler, cantorial and rabbinical student Hillary Chorny, Jeff Stellman, and congregation president Jules Resnick.
by Johanna Ginsberg, NJJN Staff Writer
Sometimes, to find an answer, you have to ask the right question.
At White Meadow Temple, asking the right question led to the synagogue’s creation of its own in-house, custom siddur — and not just a prayer book, but a scrapbook connecting prayer and memories.
Attendance at Friday night services was dwindling at the Conservative synagogue in Rockaway when Rabbi Benjamin Adler sought fresh ideas.
“It was frustrating that people were discontented with the service,” he said, but when he and other congregation leaders asked what to do, “we only got stale responses, like ‘make it shorter’ or ‘use more English.’” When the idea of experimental services was suggested, the community balked.
Then, Adler and student cantor Hillary Chorny had an epiphany: They were asking the wrong question.
Using a community organizing model, they changed their question to “What’s your prayer story?” and created informal “house meetings” where the question could be put to congregants.
“People started really talking about their best and worst memories of prayer,” Chorny recalled on Feb. 6 in a meeting with a visitor and several of the people involved in coordinating the new siddur.
The number one complaint, it turned out, was the siddur, the 1985 edition of the movement’s Sim Shalom prayerbook.
“It was too heavy, too hard to read, and there was too much flipping around,” said Chorny. “Congregants kept saying they don’t connect to the prayers.”
On the other hand, she said, “People also started telling stories we had never heard. An older woman pulled out a piece of paper. It was Xeroxed from the old shiva books. She said she found tremendous comfort from this prayer after her husband had died. She started to tear up. It was very powerful.”
Others recalled travelling to a rally for Soviet Jewry in the 1980s. “They recalled being on the bus on I-95, seeing other buses all converging. They were praying on the bus, and they saw that people on the other buses were praying. Here they were, on their way to do this mitzva to free Soviet Jews, and they had this powerful moment of praying.”
Clergy and lay leaders realized that prayer that was meaningful to congregants had to do with life moments, both individually and as a community, and how people connected to prayers through their memories.
Going into the house meetings, said Adler, “I had no idea we were going to do a siddur. We didn’t come with any preconceived notions.”
Congregants started bringing in personal memorabilia and photos, documents and bentschers, letters from previous rabbis, even kipot from family events which another congregant photographed. The synagogue received a $4,000 grant from the Ohio-based David and Inez Myers Foundation to create what they believe is the first siddur documenting the intersection of prayer and community memory.
At press time, Chorny was putting the finishing touches on the document, which will launch at kabalat Shabbat on Friday, Feb. 14. Tailored to the synagogue’s customs, it should entail no page-skipping.
Each spread includes the Hebrew prayer with its transliteration and translation, as well as images of the memorabilia relating to the prayer on that page. For L’cha Dodi, which refers to the Sabbath Bride, for example, there’s a photo of kipot from a community wedding. For Psalm 92, a favorite of the temple’s former religious leader, Rabbi Jacob Weitman, there’s an excerpt from the farewell letter he wrote to the congregation opening with the words of that psalm.
Stu Lefkowitz of White Meadow Lake, a committee member and past congregation president, acknowledged that services with the new siddur may not directly engage everyone. Still, he said, “Even if people are bored with the service, combing through the siddur will make them a part of it.”
The group has been actively working on the siddur since June 2012, and they will print 125 copies for the first service.
Posted in Alumni At Large, From the Field, General, Seminary Project, Success Stories
Comments Off on Organizing in Shul: ‘Scrapbook’ connects worshipers to prayer
