(This item by Joshua Avedon is cross-posted from the blog at eJewish Philanthropy.)

A recent article on the eJewishPhilanthropy site, (Innovation Isn’t Dead, It’s Working February 5, 2013) raised concerns that last year’s merger of Hazon with the Isabella Freedman Jewish Retreat Center has sparked casual conversations about the end of the innovation era. The authors of that post, my colleagues Lisa Lepson and Will Schneider, correctly argue that there is continuing evidence that Jewish innovation is going strong, and, more importantly, beginning to make a real impact on the broader Jewish world.

Like my friends from the Joshua Venture Group and Slingshot, I also believe that funding Jewish innovation should not be a zero sum game in which the community is forced to choose between supporting startups or more mature organizations. They articulated what worries them about the current moment – as a fellow traveler in the same space, let me share what worries me. I am less concerned that an emerging awareness of the need to fund second-stage organizations might cause community focus to “shift completely away from support of early-stage entrepreneurial initiatives.” For that to be happen, first there would actually need to be a demonstrable focus on funding new Jewish initiatives, and then some evidence that money was shifting away from it. I’m much more concerned about the total dollars available to Jewish innovation in all shapes and sizes.

While it may get a good deal of ink and airtime, the data suggests that Jewish innovation, of both the startup and post-startup varieties, remains underfunded in proportion to both its reach and its growth. The 2010 Survey of New Jewish Initiatives in North America (published as The Jewish Innovation Economy by Jumpstart with The Natan Fund and The Samuel Bronfman Foundation) found that Jewish startups engaged more than 9% of the North American Jewish population with less than 2% of the roughly $10 billion spent annually in the Jewish nonprofit sector. The average year-on-year growth rate in the number of Jewish startups between 2002 and 2010 was 29%. The amount of funding available to them does not seem to be keeping pace with that trajectory.

In 2011, the Bikkurim report From First Fruits to Abundant Harvest issued a clarion call for second stage funding, based on data that showed a sector-wide recognition of the need, and an increasing number of deserving organizations that are ready for scaling investment. Over a third of respondents to Bikkurim’s survey indicated that funding for both startups and post-startups was inadequate. While there has been a growing interest in the creation of mezzanine funds, The Samuel Bronfman Foundation’s Second Stage Fund is the first that I know of to have made grants with that explicit focus. The Bikkurim report also highlighted the persistence of a philanthropic preference for newness, and that funding often falls off for projects once they’ve reached that awkward adolescent stage of growth, just when they need it most. This is especially unfortunate since reaching that stage is usually a sign of market relevance and programmatic success.

Of course, innovation isn’t limited to newer organizations. Support for innovation within larger, more established Jewish organizations seems to have increased over the past few years. This is evidenced through collaborations such as the PresenTense Community Entrepreneur Partnership, through targeted funding/microgrant programs, and via new intrapreneurial efforts. The Slingshot Guide is a good indicator for this. The ’12-’13 publication includes more projects operating under the auspices of established organizations than ever before. Although it is more difficult to quantify this type of innovation than it is to survey startups and autonomous initiatives (where a sample can be easily defined by founding date and organizational structure), there are promising signs that innovation is making inroads where it is needed most.

The Jewish innovation boom has happened in spite of limited monetary resources, relying mostly on the ingenuity, skill, and social capital of its leaders. Given that passion seems to fuel new Jewish initiatives more than money, there is no reason to think that innovation is dead, or even slowing down. But the nature of innovation is changing, and the organizational forms it takes must evolve in the new epoch to meet the needs of the community. When a promising new idea comes along, the question is not only whether it will get traction in the market, but also whether it needs to be an independent entity, or might better be pursued in partnership with, or even as a project within, an existing organization.

Innovation in isolation is irrelevant. It’s the transformative potential of Jewish innovation to shape and define the Jewish community in the 21st century that gives innovation its resonance and power. No one I know who works in and supports Jewish innovation is saying that innovation is on its way out. But most of us believe that a maturing marketplace requires a more strategic approach to funding as well as an increased focus on collaboration and consolidation. My colleagues and I agree that innovation is working, precisely because the established community is increasingly adopting it as a priority. Once we have succeeded at making innovation a central principle of the entire system, I’m optimistic that the community will find the resources to fund it at all stages – and in all forms – accordingly.

Jumpstart Co-founder Shawn Landres speaks to White House gathering
of faith-based social entrepreneurs

Jumpstart presented a Jewish perspective on social entrepreneurship at the July 11th White House Faith-Based Social Innovators Conference. The afternoon’s discussions offered new insights about the important role that faith-based social innovators play in expanding opportunity and addressing social issues.

Senior White House directors Jonathan Greenblatt of the Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation and Joshua Dubois of the Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships convened the gathering of more than 100 leaders from a diversity of faiths and organizations.

Emily Leventhal, Shawn Landres, Jonathan Greenblatt (White House), Joshua DuBois (White House), Joshua Avedon, & Paul Vandeventer (Community Partners)

Shawn was one of only nine featured “spotlight innovators” chosen to address the entire conference because they and their organizations “are finding innovative ways to make a positive impact on our society and economy.” His remarks were about Jumpstart’s work, and about bridging the gap between faith-based and secular social entrepreneurship.
“Faith-based need not mean faith-bound,” Shawn reminded the room. “And secular social enterprise need not isolate itself from faith-born creativity.”

Jumpstart was represented by Shawn and Co-founder Joshua Avedon, as well as board members Emily Leventhal and Rachel Cohen Gerrol (who just started her term as Chair this month). We were joined by Paul Vandeventer of Community Partners, with which we operate the Project Partnership, a joint venture to fiscally sponsor emerging Jewish and interreligious organizations. Also present was Perry Oretzky, President of the Angell Foundation.

Learn more:

• Check out the Storify-ed live tweets from the conference
• Watch the video of Shawn’s remarks
• Read excerpts from Shawn’s remarks
• See photos from the event

Media & Blog Coverage

• JTA news brief
• “Of Wedges and Willing Allies” (Paul Vandeventer, Community Partners)

Organizations

• White House Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation
• White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships
• Community Partners
• Project Partnership
• Angell Foundation

Follow the conversation on Twitter: #WHInnovation, #FBSocInn

• Jumpstart: @jmpstrt
• Shawn Landres: @shawnlandres
• Jonathan Greenblatt: @j0nathan_g
• Joshua DuBois: @joshuadubois

Video and excerpts from Shawn Landres's remarks from the White House Faith-Based Social Innovators Conference – July 11, 2012

I am here because my personal and professional journeys as a human being and as a citizen are profoundly shaped by faith and covenant. Judaism stands for dignity, opportunity, freedom, and responsibility. It calls us to work for the healing of the wider world. The remarkable mosaic in this room attests that our values and visions are not unique but shared by many.

L-R: Salman Ravala (Dollar-a-Day Scholarship Fund), Heather Larson (Willow Creek Community Church), Shawn Landres, Sajan George (Matchbook Learning)

…For generations, the Jewish communal sector has been at the forefront of social innovation benefiting all Americans. … Over the past 15 years, however, an important shift has occurred. The primary engine for innovation no longer is found in centralized communal institutions working to meet collective Jewish needs. Today, that energy has shifted outward to independent grassroots initiatives, many of which seek to express Jewish values through service, education, and social & civic advocacy. Put another way, if 20th century institutions ensured that Jewish Americans are seen and served as equal citizens, then 21st-century innovators are demonstrating Judaism’s unique value propositions and contributions to our nation’s open, diverse, democratic society.

…None of our impact is attributable to ourselves alone. All of Jumpstart’s work is collaborative, with partners and networks that complement our strengths and extend our reach. Indeed, Jewish tradition obliges us to work for change that is beyond any one of us to achieve independently.

One of those innovative partnerships is with Community Partners, a nationally recognized fiscal sponsor, grantmaking intermediary, and civic catalyst. …[Our] Project Partnership connects faith-based and community organizations in ways that reflect the strength of each without duplication or encroachment.

That’s because faith-based need not mean faith-bound. And secular social enterprise need not isolate itself from faith-born creativity.

…Stephen Carter once observed that religion in the public square sometimes stops conversations when it should start them. But our values can and should help shape the common good. But our values can and should help shape the common good. Jumpstart’s leave policy supports natural and adoptive parents. It honors both the bereaved and those who care for mourners. Jumpstart’s non-discrimination policy includes all sexual orientations, gender identities, and gender expressions. All for Jewish reasons.

…Today’s Summit is welcome recognition that there now are more creative, passionate, authentic, and compelling ways to connect faith & community to action in the world than at any other time in recent history. We merit recognition and respect, not only to be heard but also to have a say.

Together we can harness and sustain their energy to power the transformation of our communities, our nation, and our planet. If the momentum in this room is any indicator, we have an extraordinary future ahead.

Full coverage of Jumpstart’s White House appearance, including video of Shawn’s complete remarks….

(This item by Joshua Avedon and Shawn Landres is cross-posted from the blog at eJewish Philanthropy.)

Last week the Jewish innovation ecosystem suffered the first loss of a keystone organization since the economic ice age began. The Professional Leaders Project (PLP) is the premier independent entity for developing and educating the next generation of Jewish leaders, both volunteer and professional.

One thing is clear. PLP’s mission of “turning leadership over to the next generation” will live on, most importantly because of its sustained investment in developing the talent and networks that formed the backbone of its program offering. And PLP itself plans to take its mission online with a Virtual ThinkTank, issuing a call for ideas on how to sustain its contribution to the sector even without programs on the ground. Whether specific PLP programs find new homes at other organizations (and we hope they do – more on that later), thousands of people will carry the lessons they learned through PLP to organizations old, new, and yet to be born.

One of PLP’s many unique aspects is that it recognizes that individual leaders, and the relationships between them, lie at the heart of effective innovation and advocacy for change. PLP has made no distinctions in its offerings to volunteer and professional leaders, in part because it has understood the fluid nature of nonprofit leadership in the 21st century. This approach has led to some interesting interactions and collaborations that never could have taken place in more conventional leadership development programs, where individuals are often stuck in tracks according to their interests, roles or geography.

PLP is the vision of an extraordinary leader, Rhoda Weisman. In her previous role as Hillel‘s Chief Creative Officer, she created a slew of new initiatives which helped redefine the organization for a new era, including Tzedek Hillel, the Campus Leadership Initiative, and many others. She was a key player in the creation of the Taglit-Birthright Israel program, as well as the first director of the Jewish Campus Service Corps. As a Jewish innovator, Rhoda has defined what it means to think out of the box, empower new leadership, and catalyze change in organizations new and established. Her work at Hillel demonstrated her unique aptitude for spotting and developing talent in an atmosphere of collaboration and personal growth. In creating PLP, Rhoda identified and filled a vacuum in Jewish leadership development, one that bridged the established and emerging Jewish nonprofit worlds. Regardless of PLP’s ultimate institutional fate, Rhoda deserves credit for launching and developing the next generation of Jewish leadership. We are sure that whatever she does next will have a similar impact, and Jumpstart is proud to have her as a friend and as a member of our board of advisors.

PLP’s absence will have an immediate impact on the hundreds of young leaders who have been a part of its networks and participants in its leadership development programs. These include hundreds of emerging leaders from around the nation who were recently recruited for PLP’s LiveNetworks 2009, a year-long seminar series incorporating leadership development, Jewish learning, analytical tools, coaching, and mentoring. While many Jewish organizations struggle to find candidates, PLP was able to hand-pick participants who were actually willing to go out of pocket to pay for their participation.

Especially pressing is the question of how to honor the commitment made by the newest members of the LiveNetwork hubs in New York City, Washington, DC, Chicago, San Francisco and Los Angeles, 20- and 30-somethings who signed up (and even were willing to pay) for training, networking, and mentoring as volunteer and professional leaders in 2009 and 2010. They now have nowhere to go. Our community cannot afford to let their energy go untapped: we must find alternate ways for them to engage their passions and skills.

Beyond the programs themselves, PLP shutting its doors (and we hope it’s only temporary), is a signal moment for the Jewish startup sector. PLP isn’t just one innovative organization; it is also a critical clearinghouse for the entire Jewish nonprofit workforce pipeline. This is not a trivial need. As the NonProfit Times reported on August 13, the senior management gap in U.S. nonprofits is a matter of growing nationwide concern. The Bridgespan Group, a nonprofit human capital think tank, predicts that overcoming this “leadership deficit” will require a commitment “to attract and develop a leadership population 2.4 times the size of the total number currently employed” (Finding Leaders for America’s Nonprofits, 2009).

This issue is only magnified in the organized Jewish community, where according to a study for the Jewish Funders Network and The Andrea and Charles Bronfman Philanthropies (ACBP) entitled “” (posted August 17 on the JFN website), retirements by long-serving baby boomer executives will create succession challenges at as many as 90% of Jewish organizations over the next decade. As the only independent initiative dedicated to identifying, recruiting, nurturing, and mentoring new volunteer and professional leaders regardless of their institutional affiliation, PLP played a vital role seeding the Jewish ecosystem with human capital. PLP’s absence will be felt quickly, and painfully, unless others step up to fill the gap with programs that continue these critical elements: institutional independence, the recognition that volunteer and professional leadership are intertwined and often interchangeable over the course of a person’s career, and, most importantly, not only a genuine belief in and commitment to the process of innovation and renewal, but indeed the explicit acknowledgement of the real contributions that new leaders bring to the missions and institutions they serve.

The bigger question raised by PLP’s abrupt disappearance is whether this is a harbinger of a cascade of more closures of innovative new projects, or (as we think more likely), the beginning of a realignment of the Jewish infrastructure as it adapts to the altered landscape left behind by the big freeze caused by the economic crisis and Madoff grand larceny. Likely more significant projects will fold, and others may merge in order to survive. Perhaps PLP’s investment in turning Jewish leadership over to the next generation infused the innovation ecosystem with enough human resource momentum so that the work done by PLP will become a core activity of all organizations, both old and new. Or perhaps other organizations will actually pick up some of the programs launched by PLP – we’re thinking especially of the LiveNetwork hubs – and give them new life.

Certainly it would be a waste to allow the framework created by PLP’s visionary work to simply cease because of a potentially temporary funding challenge. One could imagine regional and/or national players deciding that the gatherings of talent represented by the LiveNetwork Hubs shouldn’t be abandoned, then deciding to absorb them into their own organizations. Or perhaps, just perhaps, the shock of this singular event will cause some forward-thinking Jewish philanthropists to come forward to rescue PLP and to demonstrate to the hundreds of PLPers that their unique value to the Jewish world is not unnoticed, and must be preserved, whether in its current form or in a new structure.

Whatever happens, when the history is written of the first epoch of the Jewish innovation ecosystem, we believe that our community will see PLP for what it was, is and could be: one of the Jewish world’s richest talent pools and development laboratories for emerging leadership. Viva PLP.

We’ve had a busy few weeks, and as our first post to the official Jumpstart blog we’d like to invite a discussion about the recent release of our first Research Report, Key Findings from the 2008 Survey of New Jewish Organizations. 

Jumpstart partnered with The Natan Fund and The Samuel Bronfman Foundation for this first of its kind study of the Jewish startup sector. A conversation about the key findings from the report has already sprung up on a number of blogs and other news outlets. 

eJewishPhilanthropy’s Dan Brown previewed the survey’s findings, noting startups are “transforming our communal landscape” and highlighting Los Angeles’s growing prominence as a center for Jewish innovation (Jewish Startups: LA’s Increasing Role,  Jewish LA in the Spotlight).

Capping an eventful first week, The Chronicle of Philanthropy‘s Ben Gose highlighted the study’s findings for the secular nonprofit world, noting especially the diversity of the people involved in Jewish startups, from the relatively unconnected to the deeply involved, all seeking options they had not found in established Jewish institutions  (New Jewish Charities Have Attracted Diverse Clients, Study Finds). 

Overall the response has been encouraging and informative. As we consider potential policy recommendations and other next steps, we really do hope to hear additional comments, reactions, and feedback from as wide a range of stakeholders as possible (see, and please fill, comments box below).