JFN members Stacie Cherner of the Jim Joseph Foundation and Menachem "Manny" Menchel of the William Davidson Foundation write about the "Career Trajectories for Jewish Educators" study they jointly funded and the programming it spawned, including a series of JFN webinars that you can watch here.
Our foundations learned a lot from each other during this research journey. We each started with different ideas about how the research would progress and the learnings we might uncover. These predictions were clearly products of our respective foundations’ lens of grantmaking—and they were proven to be too narrow. Through collaboration, the perspectives and experiences of the other grantmaker helped shape our own understanding of the research and how the findings could be relevant and usable in our work. Because of the tangible benefits we experienced, we want to continue learning with more funders and practitioners. We want more convenings and communication with other leaders. The challenge of creating a reliable pipeline of Jewish educators demands a response inspired by a larger collective. Collaboration certainly comes with challenges—we experienced those too—but, ultimately, it leads to higher quality research insights that better benefit the field.
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