Save the date! I’m very pleased to announce that on March 15-17, 2021, we will be offering an online event unlike any other. Our 2021 International Conference will bring together technology and design to promote the peer-to-peer connection and learning that make our live conferences so magical. An energizing, active, and fun online experience, it will cure your Zoom fatigue.

The conference will run each day from 11 am – 3 pm Eastern (5 pm – 9 pm Israel; 8 am – 11 am Pacific).

While conditions will not allow an in-person conference this spring, I promise that our online event will be the next best thing. As always, we will discuss the big issues affecting us and the world, in the deep and interactive ways that make JFN unique. Our keynote speaker, Dr. Larry Brilliant brings decades of expertise in the philanthropic, technology, and healthcare sectors, with a wide-ranging career that has included helping wipe out smallpox and founding Google’s charitable arm. Other speakers will help us focus on the big challenges affecting the Jewish world and help us reflect on what we, as funders, can do to address them. 

But our virtual conference won’t just be a bunch of Zoom sessions with big names. Our easy-to-use platform will allow members to engage around topics we care about, find others with shared interests, learn from one another, and simply kibitz. We always hear that a key part of conferences is what happens in the hallways between sessions, and this event promises to emulate that experience online.

Our 2021 virtual conference will be the beginning of an arc of online programming spanning 2021. Around the chagim, we’ll hold another Aspire, our annual High Holidays program launched last month with great success. Because we continue to hope that a live Israel event in the fall may be possible, we ask you to hold October 25-27, 2021 for a global Jewish ideas forum that helps us navigate “the day after.” If we cannot convene live, we’ll convert this to a substantive online experience focused on philanthropy in Israel.

Please stay tuned for more details in the coming weeks. I can’t wait to see you all soon!