2019 Grantmaking

The SRE Network awarded a total of $1.86 million to sixteen organizations. Through either field-building or internal organizational efforts, these grantees are strengthening Jewish organizations’ capacity to address safety, respect, and equity at scale.

Field-Building Grants

The following 12 organizations have received grants of $10,000 to $300,000 to build the capacity of the field to research, develop, and deliver programming to address community gaps at a critical mass.

The Jewish Education Project
The Jewish Education Project inspires and empowers educators to create transformative Jewish experiences, helping children, teens, and families thrive in today’s highly complex and challenging world. The Jewish Education Project will create professional development opportunities for congregational educators, offering workshops, webinars, peer learning networks, and mentoring programs to promote safety, respect, and equity in the Jewish community.

Foundation for Jewish Camp and Prizmah: Center for Jewish Day Schools
Creating Standards of Safety, Respect, and Equity in Jewish Camps and Day Schools: Founded in 1998, Foundation for Jewish Camp (FJC) is committed to bolstering excellence throughout the Jewish camp field and amplifying their success and impact by catalyzing innovation. Prizmah: Center for Jewish Day Schools provides day schools with tools to foster educational excellence, financial vitality, and community support that will make a day school education the first choice for Jewish families. FJC and Prizmah will capitalize on their institutions’ trusted relationships with day schools and camps to close the gaps in training, protocols, and standards in SRE.

JCCA of North America
Creating a Field-Wide Culture of Safety, Respect, Equity across JCC Communities: The mission of the Jewish Community Centers Association of North America (JCCA) is to lead and connect the JCC Movement, advancing and enriching North American Jewish life. With this grant, the JCCA will pilot a cohort program in up to 10 local JCCs to provide training, information and tools to enhance their ability to become harassment- and discrimination-free communities. Through training, support, cohort learning, and microgrants to fund local partnerships, JCCA will help to create workspaces and Jewish communities that are safe, equitable and harassment-free.

Jewish Women International
Men as Allies: Jewish Women International (JWI) is the leading Jewish organization working to empower women and girls by ensuring and protecting their physical safety and economic security, promoting and celebrating inter-generational leadership, inspiring civic participation and community engagement, and engaging men as allies. JWI plans to research, create, and deliver model, interactive programming and resources for men that will change the culture at all levels of Jewish organizations and move men to the position of allies in combatting sexual harassment and misconduct. The JCC of Greater Washington and the Jewish Federation of Greater Washington will serve as key implementation partners.

JWFNY: Ta’amod
Ta’amod: Stand Up!: Ta’amod offers a breadth of resources including respectful workplace training through a Jewish lens for staff, clergy, and lay leadership that is both legally compliant and provides a deep understanding of the specific dynamics of the Jewish communal space. This prevention training applies a unique approach to creating respectful cultures that intrinsically reduce the risk of harassment. Ta’amod also curates a resource bank of vetted resources – organizations and articles, secular and religious, local and national – that includes respectful workplace trainers, organizational dynamics consultants, legal services providers, counseling services, experts in state and federal laws, Jewish communal organizations, and point people in regional locations engaged in the work. Ta’amod is an initiative of The Good People Fund and The Jewish Women’s Foundation of New York.

Leading Edge
The mission of Leading Edge is to increase the flow of high-quality talent to senior leadership positions at Jewish nonprofit organizations. To lay the foundation for new initiatives to tackle the gender gap in leadership, Leading Edge will undertake a rigorous research process that asks: “Why are there so few women in senior leadership positions in the Jewish nonprofit sector, and what might be done to close the gender gap?”

Moving Traditions
Culture Shift: Moving Traditions emboldens teens by fostering self-discovery, challenging sexism, and inspiring a commitment to Jewish life and learning. Moving Traditions seeks to create honest conversations around gender, power, and sexism in the Jewish summer camp workplace by designing a train-the-trainer curriculum in partnership with BBYO and JCCA to prepare camp leaders to train their staff to set and uphold appropriate boundaries in the unique camp environment.

Sacred Spaces
Sacred Spaces’ Accreditation: Research and Tool Development: sacred Spaces builds healthy Jewish communities by partnering with Jewish institutions to prevent and respond to sexual abuse and other abuses of power. With this funding, Sacred Spaces will research the viability and mechanics of creating an accreditation system for safe and respectful Jewish organizations. Building on the SRE Diagnostic, they will also lay the foundations for an interactive, instructive, online organizational self-assessment and policy-development tool that can be an integral piece of the accreditation system or a valuable standalone resource.

Shalom Bayit
Shalom Bayit, fiscally sponsored by the Tides Center, is the leading Jewish voice and change agent on gender based violence in the San Francisco Bay Area. Their mission is to foster the social change and community response necessary to eradicate domestic violence in the Jewish community. The WE COMMIT Bay Area Summit in May 2019 sparked momentum among Jewish leaders and institutions to address, prevent, and responsibly respond to sexual harassment in Jewish spaces. Shalom Bayit will act as the backbone for post-convening continuation of the work. This will include mapping out a follow-up plan for agency engagement and providing the staff and expertise to handle requests for training, technical assistance, confidential consultation, and support arising from lifting up the cover on this all-too-silenced issue.

Shalom Hartman Institute of North America
The Shalom Hartman Institute (SHI) is a leading center of Jewish thought and education, serving Israel and North America. SHI’s mission is to strengthen Jewish peoplehood, identity, and pluralism and ensure that Judaism is a compelling force for good in the 21st century. Created Equal: Men, Women and the Ethics of Shared Leadership is a research and education project which confronts the struggles of educational leaders directly by considering the relationship between Jewish thought and the deep-rooted issues facing gender inequity and ethical leadership. In the next year, SHI will expand the Created Equal project through continued research, creation of a year-long Created Equal fellowship program, development of a leaders’ guide to Created Equal curriculum, and integration of Created Equal’s lessons into existing partnerships and curricula.

Slingshot
Curriculum for Grantmaking with a Gender Lens Guide: Slingshot mobilizes young Jewish philanthropists as funders and active change agents, who, with partners, shape the Jewish community to be vibrant and continuously evolving. Slingshot will be publishing a “Guide to Funding with a Gender Lens,” which seeks to change the hearts and minds of the reader around philanthropy and Jewish and gender lens pedagogy and hopes to awaken the reader to the opportunity, necessity, and responsibility to shift Jewish funding with a gender lens. They are also developing an accompanying curriculum in order to help users, organizations, and foundations best incorporate the practices in the workbook into their everyday work.

Union for Reform Judaism
Reform Movement Gender Equity Project: The Union for Reform Judaism (URJ) provides vision and voice to transform the way people connect to Judaism, helping congregations to stay relevant and innovative, motivating more young Jews to embrace Jewish living, agitating for a more progressive society, and fostering meaningful connections to Israel. It counts among its members over 900 congregations and their millions of members and visitors. The URJ will support and help coordinate complementary work on the issue of gender inequity being carried out by the Reform Pay Equity Initiative, Women of Reform Judaism, the Women’s Rabbinic Network, the Central Conference of American Rabbis’ Task for on the Experience of Women in the Rabbinate, and the American Conference of Cantors.

The Union for Reform Judaism (URJ) provides vision and voice to transform the way people connect to Judaism, helping congregations to stay relevant and innovative, motivating more young Jews to embrace Jewish living, agitating for a more progressive society, and fostering meaningful connections to Israel. It counts among its members over 900 congregations and their millions of members and visitors. The URJ will support and help coordinate complementary work on the issue of gender inequity being carried out by the Reform Pay Equity Initiative, Women of Reform Judaism, the Women’s Rabbinic Network, the Central Conference of American Rabbis’ Task for on the Experience of Women in the Rabbinate, and the American Conference of Cantors.

 

Capacity Building Grants

The following 4 organizations have received grants of $25,000 to $37,500 to build the capacity of organizations to implement the SRE’s Standards for safety, respect, and equity in-house.

Footsteps
Footsteps supports and affirms individuals and families who have left, or are contemplating leaving, insular ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities in their quest to lead self-determined lives. Footsteps is building on its newly developed preventative policies and protocols for responding to harassment or assault, focusing on infusing a trauma-informed approach to safety and respect throughout its organizational culture.

Goldring/Woldenberg Institute of Southern Jewish Life
The Institute of Southern Jewish Life Inc (ISJL) supports, connects, and celebrates Jewish life in the South. The ISJL seeks to help even the smallest Southern communities connect with the Safety Respect Equity movement. Starting with their own organization as a model, ISJL is developing accessible materials aligned with the “add-on programming” they already provide to their partner communities, kicking off the conversation and initiative at their 2020 regional education conference.

Hillel: the Foundation for Jewish Campus Life
Hillel International enriches the lives of Jewish students so that they may enrich the Jewish people and the world. Hillel is continuing its implementation of comprehensive standards in sexual harassment prevention and response and gender equity and empowerment. The Schusterman International Center will lead the way for all local Hillels to adopt policies, protocols, norms and support systems that make clear the expectations of all Hillel stakeholders and allow students, professionals, and volunteer leaders of all genders not only to be safe but to thrive.

Ramah Camping Movement
Ramah is the camping arm of Conservative Judaism, and their mission is to create and sustain excellent summer camps and Israel programs that inspire commitment to Jewish life and develop the next generation of Jewish leaders. The National Ramah Commission (NRC) is further developing its training program for year-round personnel ineffective approaches to preventing sexual harassment and abuse. They aim to ensure that every Ramah staff member, camper, and year-round community educator is aware of his/her rights, obligations, and recourse.

If you have questions about Grantmaking or about SRE's Community Investments, please email info@srenetwork.org.

 

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