“As COVID-19 drastically affects the world, our country and our community, we know that many of our grantee partners and other organizations face unprecedented challenges and concerns. We want you to know that we, your philanthropic partners, are in this together with you.”
“Whether you are guiding staff about travel or remote work arrangements, wondering what other groups are doing in response to Covid-19, fielding donors’ questions about your nonprofit’s response or the impact on planned events, or worrying that the virus will dampen your fundraising, it’s a lot to handle.
To help you cope, here are a few online resources we’ve collected…”
“I returned from the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) conference in Washington, D.C., and as a result, I’ve had to cancel two weeks of meetings, am carb loading, working in my pajamas and missing fresh air desperately. Was it worth it?
It was life changing.”
“But what do we actually mean by Jewish literacy and illiteracy in Jewish communal discourse? Unless we are clear about the problem that we are trying to solve, it seems hard to imagine that we will succeed in solving it.”
“Somehow, in 1995, these young, devout, idealistic Jewish superheroes – deeply pious, theologically rigorous, yet outward-looking, too – zeroed in on one of the greatest clashes between those within the rabbinic mind-set and those beyond it: the wedding.”
“The central aim of text study is to learn how to read a text, that is, that the text must induce the student to think, to make comparisons with the associations that occur to him, to ask and question. The point is that it is not the teacher but rather the text itself that stimulates the student; the text itself should bring the student to pose questions and to seek the answers.”
“If donors could close the aspiration gap, billions of additional big-bet dollars would flow to the world’s most challenging problems, and millions of lives could change for the better for generations to come.”
“Without broader avenues to share the lessons learned, failures are wasted. As foundations continue to embrace risk-taking, they would be well advised to commit to evaluating and sharing the outcomes in practical and public ways.”
“Great advice is always a hammer: an organizing principle that works across many domains. To get the most mileage out of a single hammer, don’t stop at using it to tackle your current pet problem. Use it everywhere. Ideas don’t get worn down from use.”
“We are all peers, learning together, regardless of position. When Moses himself was transported through time and space to Rabbi Akiva’s study house, he took a seat in the back, observing from among the students.”
