Adventures in Learning: Matan and Darim Go Viral

Over the past six months Matan, founded 12 years ago, launched the inaugural Matan Institutes for Jewish Educators.  In March, 18 Education Directors came together for two days of intense learning related to Jewish special education; in August, 40 congregational school teachers spent one day with Matan learning how to make their classrooms accessible to all learners. 

What we love about special education is that in actuality, it is simply really good education.  Special educators pay close attention to the learning styles of each of their students – whether their preferences are visual, oral, tactile or kinesthetic.  These teachers plan their lessons making sure there are elements within that will reach every type of student.  In the 21st century classroom, technology is a remarkable tool that helps students access information in the ways that work best for them, often bridging the divide between different types of learners.

And so, when Matan was accepted into Darim’s Boot Camp for Jewish Educators, we saw a remarkable opportunity to combine the best of what special education and technology have to offer.  We made a conscious decision to focus our time with Darim on the educators that we train, with a particular eye towards the launch of The Matan Institutes.  In so doing, we have had the unique opportunity to model the use of technology with educators looking to increase their skill set for engaging children with special needs, thereby impacting over 8,000 congregational school students across the country.  In “social media speak”, Darim and Matan went viral.

Matan modeled various techniques we learned from Darim, and we will continue to do so with future cohorts of educators.  Among the most well-received: a thumb-drive for participants containing every presentation, every handout and lists of relevant resources (in addition to printed and screen-projected documents, because every adult also learns differently from one another); the use of Poll Everywhere (never before seen by Matan’s participants and a great way to engage tweens and teens in the classroom); and tweets that highlighted the messages of our nationally-renowned speakers with a much wider online audience.

Perhaps most importantly, we have the opportunity to continue working with these educators through webinars (a skillset learned from Darim), thereby making Matan the first Jewish Special Education organization that provides ongoing support and mentoring to the educators we train.  Having the ability to move beyond “one off” professional development sessions provides Matan with the opportunity to truly change the landscape of how children with special needs are included in Jewish education.  Thank you, Covenant Foundation! Thank you, Darim!

Meredith Englander Polsky is the Director of Training and Advocacy at Matan, and, along with Orlee Krass, Matan's Director of Education, participated in the Social Media Boot Camp for Educators, which is generously funded by The Covenant Foundation.

Becoming the Leader of a Networked Nonprofit: The Jewish Enrichment Center

Right before Thanksgiving, Caren Levine (Darim’s Learning Network lady extraordinaire) suggested that I write a blog post about how we think about out work at the Jewish Enrichment Center as a networked nonprofit. We are not a networked nonprofit, I thought. At least not yet. But now, months later, I can see that we’ve come a long way.

Early in our planning, a few of us read The Networked Nonprofit: Connecting with Social Media to Drive Change, by Beth Kanter and Allison Fine. I was inspired by the book’s vision of a nonprofit that’s connected with its volunteers, transparent in its business, and nimble – able to shift internally, quickly, to meet emerging needs. “Do what you do best, and network the rest,” Kanter and Fine told me. As a startup with limited resources, it sounded heavenly to have a community of volunteers sharing the workload. I was hooked.

But I'm not naturally a network person. I'm the kind of person who reclassifies emails as unread, pretending I’ll answer them someday. At the time I read the book, I had never written a blog post, was never chosen by my family to take pictures (who wants a blurry, back-lit photo?), and couldn’t imagine why facebook was a good use of my time.

But Kanter and Fine had held out this tantalizing vision of what the Jewish Enrichment Center could be, and I was certain we COULD realize it in our community, if only I’d learn some new skills – online and off. So I applied for help through Darim’s Boot Camp. How would my much younger sister-in-law put it? Oh, yeah. Best. Decision. Ever.

Here’s what I’ve learned so far about being a networked nonprofit:

  • Listen. The most important thing I can do is go out and listen, online and on the ground. I’ll find out what people in my community care about. I’ll discover where parents are already online talking with each other, and I can join in the conversation.
  • Permanent beta. It’s a gigantic (and rewarding!) task to create an innovative new model of Jewish enrichment. Our mindset has to be permanent beta: what matters is that we stay true to our vision of partnering with children in Jewish exploration. The logistics of it all – they’re fluid. So we experiment, trying new ways to partner and new online tools to build relationships around Jewish engagement. We embed regular reflection into all aspects of our work. And when something doesn’t work, well, it’s frustrating, but also okay, because we knew from the start that not everything would sparkle. We move forward.
  • Be transparent. Speak authentically. As nervous as I was about opening up our work to the public, creating a blog that details our day-to-day partnership with children may have been the single most important step we took in connecting with our community. Those pictures of children really DO tell a thousand words. Parents, grandparents, folks local and national – all can get a true taste of what it’s like to be part of the Jewish Enrichment Center.
  • Listen harder. Because our deepest human desire is to be seen, to be known for who we are. I want every child, every parent, every person who interacts with the Jewish Enrichment Center to know that their contribution matters.

The response has been extraordinary. It seems that the more we share and the harder we listen, online and in person, the closer people grow to the Jewish Enrichment Center and to each other. When I share our needs or struggles (now THAT took some getting used to), people offer their help. Or at least their empathy, which I appreciate, too. We seem to be developing a communal sense that we’re all in this together. Our success is shared success.

We still have a long way to go. I want to do a better job facilitating relationships around Jewish engagement, and I don’t yet understand how to use our Facebook page and tweets to keep in-person conversations going. I also want us to be braver, making even more parts of our organization transparent. For example, I love this dashboard at the Indianapolis Museum of Art and wonder how we might make our own finances and stats more transparent (and generate a little more financial love in the process).

What have you learned on the path to becoming a networked nonprofit?

Rabbi Rebecca Milder is the Director of The Jewish Enrichment Center, and was a participant in the Social Media Boot Camp for Educators, which is generously funded by The Covenant Foundation.  She tweets at @remilder

Jewish Reconstructionist Congregation: Adventures in Social Media and Community Building

 

As my children were beginning to leave home, we read a poem by Sheri Linder at our seder each year. In it, Linder describes each generation as leaving its own Egypt, which was, in fact, the parents’ Promised Land. Near the end, the author paints this picture of watching at the Sea of Reeds:

We will watch you for a long, long time, as you cross to the other side.
We will be more wise than Pharaoh: we will know that where you go we cannot follow.

Being an education director in a progressive synagogue is not unlike being a parent. We give children and families a strong foundation and the tools we think they’ll need, and trust that they will build lives we cannot even imagine but anchored by enduring values.

This analogy proved to be true with our social media project this year: we recognized a need, provided support and tools, and watched as our families took ownership and adapted the program over the course of the year.

The Jewish Reconstructionist Congregation proposal to Darim was to create a chavurah of religious school families who would gather monthly to experience a variety of aspects of Shabbat, from a Friday evening Kabbalat Shabbat to a Saturday evening havdalah service. A social media component would enhance the monthly in-person gatherings by allowing for ongoing conversation and idea-sharing between Shabbatot. This idea originated out of a year-long school study group in which we identified the need to educate parents in Judaism – in particular, Reconstructionist Judaism – and to nurture relationships between families so parents would model for their children their own engagement in the community.

It came as a surprise to us that few turned to social media to enrich or supplement their personal connections with each other. Rather, chavurah families invited one another to shabbat dinners and gathered in the lobby during religious school classes and choir rehearsals. People seemed more ready to make time to be with each other than to connect via technology.

We learned that people read the announcements on the Facebook page but rarely commented or posted. This even applied to members who update their own Facebook page regularly and frequently. Facebook is being used to post dates for upcoming events, coordinating such things as meals or children’s activities, and to send out reminders. After each event there are one or two parents who post a sort of shout-out to the group, usually to say thank-you. Our project leadership team was not successful in our attempts to remind participants that the congregation was looking to them as a test group to explore social media applications within the congregation. I do want to say, though, that Ellen Dietrick, our Darim coach, was a great resource to us, with a knowledgeable grasp of our concept and terrific suggestions.

Chavurah participants quickly developed ownership of the group and new leadership arose. The chavurah took control of programming content and scheduling. Beyond the original scope of our proposal, a majority of chavurah families attended JRC’s Memorial Day weekend kallah, and continue to meet to plan future events and outreach.

We were disappointed that we failed to actualize our vision of chavurah blogs, online discussions and links to relevant articles. However, although the method was not what we envisioned, we were successful in our goal of creating a tightly-knit, committed community of school families that is more Jewishly knowledgeable and has the motivation and the tools to function independent of the school.
 
Based on what we observed in the chavurah and what the participants reported, JRC is going to launch a Meetup.com account so congregants can post suggestions for getting together at venues outside the synagogue. Meetup.com offers enough flexibility as to be useful to all demographics. Someone might suggest an activity that is size-limited or age-limited, such as a block of tickets to a children’s theatre; or it can be open-ended, such as a general invitation to any JRC members who want to congregate at a free concert in the park. We do not know yet if Meetup.com is the right platform, but we are optimistic that we are on the right track, balancing leadership and responsiveness.

Terri Ginsberg Bernsohn has been Director of JRC’s Religious School since June 2003, and a member of JRC since 1992.

This post is part of our special summer series highlighting stories shared by our 2011-12 Social Media Boot Camp for Educators Cohort. The SMBC for Educators is made possible through a generous grant from the Covenant Foundation.

JewDub.org: If You Build It.

I am generally not a huge fan of sports movies, but I will admit to being a total sucker for “Field of Dreams.” Something about the plot’s magical realism gets me every time. Time-traveling baseball players! James Earl Jones chuckling as he disappears into the cornfield! A chance to play catch with the younger incarnation of one’s father! If I happen across this movie while flipping channels, I am hooked until the last frame, happily dazed by the glowing headlights of the cars lined up to watch a game at the titular diamond.

The film’s tag line, “If you build it, they will come,” is the mantra that Kevin Costner’s character hears and repeats to himself. As the movie unfolds, he gradually comes to understand that constructing the baseball field will be enough to get fans out to watch a game. If he provides the physical space for the game to happen—and makes room in his heart to believe in this seemingly crazy scheme—then the crowds will show up. The movie’s conclusion vindicates the protagonist’s leap of faith and shows how taking a risk on an out-of-the-box idea can change your life.

But how often does life imitate art?

Building a new blog for the Stroum Jewish Studies Program this past year has been, in some ways, a test of the “If you build it…” philosophy. We have put time, energy, and resources into constructing an attractive site that will serve multiple constituencies. JewDub.org, in its ideal form, is an online space for University of Washington students, faculty, and community members to share conversations, research, and ideas. This project has required taking a leap of faith similar to the one taken by Costner’s character: we began building it based on a vision for innovative academic engagement, but weren’t at all sure whether the “crowd”—the various demographic groups we hoped to engage—would know how or why to show up.

As it has turned out, they ARE coming to JewDub.org, but in different ways than we had anticipated. Readers are interested in our content, but they are not yet participating in the lively discussions that we hoped our diverse blogs posts, videos, tweets, etc. would trigger; the comment spaces provided on the site remain painfully empty. In the baseball parlance of “Field of Dreams,” the fans are showing up to watch the game, but they haven’t crossed the line into the infield and become players as well.

As our team takes the summer to reflect on our progress and strategize for next year, we have a few key questions in mind. How can we create a culture wherein our readers are both consumers and producers of content on JewDub.org? How can we frame our rich material more effectively in order to stimulate discussion among our readers? What kinds of campus and community partnerships could create a more invested intergenerational audience?

For now we continue to build the site, excited about the possibilities ahead of us and knowing that with more work, outreach, and maybe a little movie magic, JewDub.org can become the dynamic online space that we envision.

Hannah Pressman is JewDub.org’s Content Manager and an Affiliate Faculty Member of the University of Washington’s Stroum Jewish Studies Program. Follow her on Twitter @jew_dub.

This post is part of our special summer series highlighting stories shared by our 2011-12 Social Media Boot Camp for Educators Cohort. The SMBC for Educators is made possible through a generous grant from the Covenant Foundation.