Grant Announcements – Final Quarter 2016

Dara Steinberg, Executive Director

 

As we enter the final months of 2016, Lippman Kanfer Foundation for Living Torah is pleased to share several grants that will commence this year:

Amplifier – $51,000 (split between 2016/17) to deploy Jewish educators more extensively across all of Amplifier’s programmatic areas including their new Giving Circle Institute in 2017.  This builds on previously granted funding that developed tools for the giving circle leaders and integrated Jewish wisdom into their Incubator.

Foundation for Jewish Camp – $100,000 over 2 years to create and disseminate experiential Jewish education resources and content to their camps.  FJC has ideas for several new, innovative programs that will make Jewish wisdom relevant and accessible to campers and is excited to pilot these resources and develop additional new ideas that can be utilized across their extensive network.

Sector Grants: An Experiment

 

by Dara Steinberg, Executive Director

 

Leverage.

If we were taking the Nonprofit SATs the analogy might be: “Leverage is to Funders, as Sustainability is to Nonprofits.”  To be flip, it’s the buzzword each constituency wants most.  In seriousness, it’s a prompt to take a thoughtful look at “How can we be better and more effective using our resources?”

As a small-to-mid-sized foundation, we are constantly thinking about how we can make all of our work – grants, programming, thought leadership, and communications – more effective and have stronger and wider impact. A recent planning grant to the Jewish Social Justice Roundtable is exciting, not only because of the grant’s own merits, but because it is our first experiment in what we’ve been referring to as “sector grants.”

Joy

Why do Jews today connect with Jewish practices and ideas? For some it may be a desire to pass on hallowed traditions. For others, an innate sense of pride. For still others: guilt. Or, all of the above (at some point or another).

There is another kind of motivation to ‘do Jewish’ that I’m interested in understanding, because I feel it myself and I wonder where it fits. I feel it when at a Shabbat meal I hear and sing a melody that resonates and reverberates around me – sometimes because it is the tune of that time of year, other times because of the beauty of the melody itself. It comes when I emerge from a pre-holiday mikvah, ready to be new again. It arises when I look around a kumtzitz campfire, take in the faces of people I am connected to and sense the way in which together we make a community.

If pressed to choose a word for this feeling, I would call it ‘joy.’ Perhaps I could call it ‘pleasure,’ but pleasure can sound so hedonistic. Better yet, Simcha is a Hebrew word that comes closer, but maybe that’s because I read more layers of meaning into a Hebrew term than into a stark English word. Regardless of what we call it, it is a very positive feeling. A Gen-Xer who grew up in a mostly ritually unobservant home, as an adult I participate in Jewish practices … because I enjoy them.