Rapid Response Fund Grantees

The Safety Respect Equity Network is pleased to announce $500,000 in funding to the following five organizations as part of its inaugural Rapid Response Fund grant program. These projects are working to address pressing needs to promote safety, respect, and equity in Jewish communities. The grants are intended to be an investment in upfront field-building needs, such as coordinating and scaling training programs for Jewish organizations, developing assessment tools, curricula, and other resources. 

The Gender Equity in Hiring Project

The Gender Equity in Hiring Project is transforming the endemic culture of gender bias that continues to keep women from senior staff positions within Jewish organizations. The Project, drawing on the strengths of design thinking, supports organizations in ensuring their systems, processes and hiring practices reflect the Jewish values of equality and fairness. By strengthening organizations’ awareness of gender bias and helping them to respond, the Project hopes to see more women rise to positions of leadership. Learn more here.

Jewish Women’s Archive

The Jewish Women’s Archive (JWA) documents Jewish women’s stories, elevates their voices and inspires them to be agents of change. JWA collects the stories of Jewish women, past and present, and shares them on its website jwa.org, the world’s largest source of information about Jewish women, and in multimedia formats, such as in its podcast, Can We Talk?, and its leadership training program for female-identified teens, the Rising Voices Fellowship. By promoting the stories and achievements of Jewish women, JWA works for a more inclusive Jewish narrative and future. With the Rapid Response grant, JWA is looking forward to expanding the work of its Archiving #MeToo project, which will collect, preserve, and share Jewish women’s stories to create an archival record of gender harassment and abuse in the Jewish community, and mine it for themes and understandings to foster communal healing and change. Learn more here.

Jewish Women’s Foundation of New York

The Jewish Women’s Foundation of New York and the Good People Fund are collaborating on an initiative to help Jewish communal institutions and all who work, learn, or worship at them develop cultures of safety, respect, and equity. Providing resources to the Jewish community such as positive workplace culture and harassment prevention training, referrals to legal, organizational, and mental/emotional health professionals in the field, the project brings this work to the Jewish community with a lens of Jewish values and ethics. For resources and more information, please contact National Director, Nicole Nevarez, nicole@jewishwomenny.org.

Sacred Spaces

Sacred Spaces is a cross-denominational initiative working to create a systemic solution to abuses of power in Jewish institutions. Sacred Spaces partners with institutions to increase their capacity to prevent and respond to abuses of power, through the formation of in-house Safety Committees. The Safety Committees are provided with tools and expert guidance to assess safety, develop comprehensive policies, train stakeholders, and conduct ongoing evaluation and safety plans – through a Jewish lens. Should allegations or policy violations arise, Sacred Spaces provides crisis consults to guides institutions in responding ethically and responsibly. Sacred Spaces looks forward to scaling their work through the formalization of their accreditation program and developing additional resources and technology for the field.

Women’s Rabbinic Network

The Women’s Rabbinic Network (WRN), a member of Reform Movement, supports and advocates for Reform female rabbis and rabbinic students and the values they uphold. WRN’s most recent work, Safe Employees and Employers Project seeks to provide sexual harassment prevention training to rabbinical and cantorial students at six seminaries. WRN, in partnership with each seminary, as well as B’kavod, looks forward to creating customized programs focused on sexual harassment prevention, bystander training and ally training for faculty, staff and students in order to create safe, respectful, equitable Jewish community for all. Learn more here.

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