Collective purpose: Lessons from Jewish organizations during crisis
How Jewish organizations have stepped up to prioritize the larger community's needs while leaning into their own purpose
I’ve tried my best to limit the content of this Substack to how Jewish communal organizations can learn from mainly non Jewish organizations. My attempt has been to critique certain aspects of existing Jewish organizations and offer suggestions on how less considered techniques might be adapted for their models in specific ways. It was hard to figure out how to adapt this theme in light of the very personal tragedy Jews worldwide have experienced in the past two weeks. It didn’t seem appropriate to write another article offering analogies Jewish organizations can learn from.
What I realized is that this has been a week where instead of Jewish organizations learning from non-Jewish ones, the learning might more appropriately go in the opposite direction. What I’ve seen is Jewish organizations laser focused on both their own mission and on the umbrella mission that unites all of them - Giving strength to our global Jewish community.
In a perfect world, in peacetime, organizations in our ecosystem would look at their unique assets, the population they serve, and their stated mission in order to find a way to maximize the value they can offer under a unified theme. On top of servicing their own mission, most Jewish organizations would ideally feel an obligation to partner with others in the overall ecosystem to “to do what’s right” in service of a collective north star for our community.
The peacetime challenge is that improving your own organization while partnering and doing what’s right for others is really hard. This newsletter has published a dozen articles about the systematic challenges faced by most Jewish organizations to make ends meet. Most of our organizations are heavily reliant on philanthropy, compete against secular alternatives for constituent time, and are impacted by trends in assimilation that don’t favor their momentum. In this environment it’s hard to survive and thrive individually let alone try to push up others.
What I’ve observed in the past 2 weeks are organizations showing an unbelievable urgency toward trying to do what’s right for both themselves as well as others. I’ve seen organizations channel their own philanthropic sources and themes toward other organizations they think merit attention in this time of need. I’ve seen donors step up in unprecedented ways to step out of their own silos and passion causes to do what is right for the larger community. I’ve seen organizations spin up programs in less than 24 hours and selflessly invite broad audiences while coordinating with others to make sure their content feels unique. All of these activities suggest we are working with a larger purpose.
The other characteristic of urgent actions I’ve witnessed have been deep expressions of individual organization mission. The thinking I’ve seen go on has been both customer-centric as well as mission-centric. I’ve seen our local JCC become a meeting point for a broad swath of Jews to digest the tragedy together. They’ve done this through both simple meetups, but also leveraged shabbat as a mechanism of meaning to host Friday night dinner for different constituents they serve. Day schools have a history of spending large amounts of money on financial aid to make sure every student can afford a day school education. This week schools are seeing an influx of Israeli families looking to escape the war. Many schools are not accepting any tuition from these families. They are also fulfilling their roles as micro communities by offering a wide variety of support for their current families to come together to comfort one another.
These past two weeks have also expressed the tremendous value a Jewish Federation creates as both a convener as well as a strategic capital allocator. I’ve seen our local Federation, CJP, lead on both of these fronts offering a place of comfort for local Jewish communal leaders, as well as serve as a communicator to our community’s largest philanthropists, helping them understand how they can best help. Locally and nationally strategy and impact teams at Federation have been relentlessly analyzing the optimal allocation of capital and really listening deeply to what is going on on the ground. These are pure expressions of Federation mission at its best.
In my opinion the lessons here are twofold:
1. This war does not appear to be ending any time soon and the fog of the past two weeks is still dense. At some point, I believe our organizations will be able to look back at their actions as a good honing barometer on their own mission. As they refine how they articulate who they are, they might look at these past two weeks as an instructive shining example of that uniqueness.
2. I think secular organizations, both for profit and non-profit, should be learning from the collective purpose that Jewish organizations are acting with this week. The benefits of articulating vision and mission are well demonstrated and many organizations do this with clarity. Ultimately though, most secular companies and nonprofits pursue a common mission with competitors and other complementary organizations. For the sake of doing the right thing, those organizations might be better served working with others in their space to advance their common mission as opposed to always being in a mode of competition. In many spaces a rising tide lifting all boats is actually true. In order to be inspired by this idea, they couldn’t have a better example than what is going on in our Jewish community right now.
While it’s hard to focus on takeaways for a tragedy that feels so fresh and has cut at the heart of our community, the pride we should feel in our urgent and strategic response is a testament to a resonant root purpose that makes us who we are. I believe this sense of purpose will continue to drive our resiliency.
Am Yisrael Chai.
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The Business of Jewish is a free bi-weekly newsletter written by Boston based consultant Ari Sussman. Read his other articles here: