SRE Network invests in strengthening the capacity of Jewish organizations through grantmaking so that Jewish communities will be strengthened, become more cohesive, experience healing, and have deeper trust in each other, their institutions, and leaders. Over the past six years, SRE has invested over $6.5M across 108 projects and 52 organizations through its grantmaking, technical assistance, and partnerships.

Throughout the year, we provide grants to outstanding Jewish organizations whose organizations and projects focus on advancing the safety, respect, and equity across North America’s Jewish communal landscape. Over the coming weeks, we will shine the spotlight on SRE's twelve extraordinary spring 2024 field building grant recipients.

This week, we are excited to introduce you to Footsteps.

About Footsteps

Footsteps provides comprehensive services to people who have chosen to leave their ultra-Orthodox communities, including social and emotional support, educational and career guidance, workshops and social activities, and access to individualized resources.

About the Grant

With a one-year grant, Footsteps will deepen, codify and proliferate its learning about how to keep the "OTD" population safe, conducting workshops for the key individuals and institutions in our ecosystem.

Q&A with Footsteps

SRE: Why is Footsteps excited to receive this grant? What change do you hope this grant will bring to your organization and the important work it does?

Footsteps: This grant comes at a time when the demand on Footsteps to provide or facilitate spaces for our community to gather is at an all-time high. Footsteps must move quickly to ensure events in and outside our program headquarters happen in a culture of safety and respect. For many years, Footsteps largely focused its efforts inward – transforming into a trauma-informed community with strong policies, procedures, boundaries and programs. Now, it is time to codify what we have learned over the years (with SRE’s technical and charitable support) and begin to share it with groups who directly or indirectly touch this fast-growing subgroup of formerly ultra-Orthodox individuals. Every dollar of this grant will be spent to help ensure that the “OTD” population will be safer whether they walk through Footsteps’ door or anyone else’s

SRE: How has being a member of SRE Network impacted Footsteps?

Footsteps: We are proud to have been a member since 2016, and one of the most valuable outcomes has been connecting and networking with others in the SRE Network for support and partnership. SRE’s funding has allowed us to pursue important workplace culture and safety projects that otherwise might have been put on the back-burner. We are simply a happier, healthier, safer, more equitable and respectful organization as a result.

SRE: What is your hope for the future of the broader Jewish nonprofit landscape?

Footsteps: What we appreciate about SRE is that it helps organizations to be the very best versions of themselves… to not only focus on the WHAT of the work, but the HOW and the WHO. And this is poignant and pertinent to Footsteps because we are about helping people who often feel othered or outed or outsiders find a place of safety and belonging and power where they are included and honored and heard for who they are. We love the direction that SRE is supportively nudging us all toward in creating a Jewish nonprofit landscape that lives its values internally and externally, in its programs and its policies, and is mindful of who has a seat and voice at the decision-making table.  

Learn more about Footsteps here.

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