Jewish Journal
Julie Gruenbaum Fax, Education Editor
Courtney Teller knows all about giving. The high school sophomore won
the community service award at Archer School for Girls, and her
grandmother, Annette Shapiro, is a legendary volunteer and
philanthropist in the Los Angeles Jewish community.
But it was the parking situation at a playground for the disabled that
gave Courtney a new appreciation for the potential impact of tzedakah.
As part of her participation in the Community Youth Foundation -- a
program of the Jewish Community Foundation of Los Angeles where teens
allocate $10,000 in grants -- Teller and her friends visited Shane's
Inspiration, a West L.A. playground for the disabled. While she was
moved by the hordes of kids, both abled and disabled, playing on the
rubber-padded, accessibly designed equipment, the fact that it took her
30 minutes to find parking signaled to her that demand had outpaced
supply.
"It was a Saturday afternoon and it was packed -- you couldn't get near
it," Teller said. "It was important to me that I saw where we could
really make a difference."
It was her impassioned plea, in part, that convinced the group of 11
teens to award Shane's Inspiration a $1,000 grant to support their
expansion of similar projects.
Teller and her peers are among a growing number of teens getting
involved in the giving -- not just doing -- end of community service.
Youth foundations and individual teen endowments across the country are
empowering teens of all economic levels to make values-based and
technically informed decisions about what is worthy of their support.
Jewish teens have given away an estimated $1 million dollars -- most of
it community money, a token amount of it their own -- since these
philanthropic training camps began to emerge in scattered Jewish
communities about 10 years ago.
In the last year energy has been building, and there are about 50 such
projects. Last spring, the Jewish Funders Network co-sponsored the
first-ever Jewish Youth Philanthropy conference in Denver, after about
five years of informal networking among teens and professionals. The
conference attracted more than 150 teens, and a follow-up conference
for professionals this spring attracted dozens. A Web site launched at
the first conference, jphilanthropy.com, run by Jewish Family and Life
Media, received 200,000 hits in its first year.
After the youth philanthropy conference last spring -- which overlapped
with the high-powered Jewish Funders Network conference -- several
donors backed the establishment of the Jewish Teen Funders Network to
serve as a central address for these programs. This year, the network
is considering proposals to award 10 communities matching grants of
$30,000 to set up new youth foundation programs.
"I think a very strong motivation behind these programs is the idea of
providing a hands-on, values-driven educational opportunity for
teenagers that provides an alternative to Hebrew school," said Stefanie
Zelkind, who runs the Jewish Teen Funders Network, an arm of the Jewish
Funders Network. "The general area of service learning and tikkun olam
resonates a lot with teenagers, and this is a program that really
engages teens very seriously and gives them a lot of responsibility."
The experience also demands serious work from the teens.
Teller and her peers spent three Sundays learning the mechanics of
giving -- how to read the financials of a nonprofit, how to conduct the
research and what questions to ask to assess an organization's efficacy
and the impact of a potential donation.
"We were the ones doing everything," Teller said.
This is the fourth group of teens -- all of them children and
grandchildren of philanthropic families associated with the Jewish
Community Foundation -- that the Community Youth Foundation has
entrusted to disburse $10,000.
They begin by brainstorming about problems and organizations that can
achieve solutions. They each research several organizations, and then
narrow the list down to organizations worthy of site visits -- an
important step for a generation that relies heavily on the web for
information.
After the visits, the teens gather to debate each organization's
comparative merits, and negotiate with each other to choose who will
receive grants.
The only limitation is that half the money must go to Jewish causes.
Beyond that, teens decide not only which organizations around the world
to give to, but to how many and at what level, an exercise that opens
up deep discussion on Jewish traditions of giving.
"The kids really learn how complicated it can be to conduct effective
philanthropy," said Susan Grinel, who runs the Community Youth
Foundation for the Jewish Community Foundation. "It's really a maturing
process."
Aside from Shane's inspiration, Teller and her peers awarded $5,000 to
Jewish World Watch, which is working for humanitarian aid and political
awareness in Darfur, and $4,000 to L.A. Youth Network, which works with
homeless kids and teens.
The fact that the kids decided to give to programs that are not
specifically Jewish is typical not only of their generation, but of
gen-Xers as well -- a trend some baby boomers and their parents find
disconcerting. Grinel says the Jewish Community Foundation set up the
youth program in response to concerns about generational disparities
that kept coming up among foundation donor families.
"When the younger generation says I want to give to Darfur, and the
older generation says this Jewish community in Los Angeles is what gave
me my start and I think we should focus here, how do you begin to
bridge that gap and let people talk on common ground?" said Grinel, who
also runs the Family Foundation Center for the Jewish Community
Foundation.
Grinel has found that focusing discussions on core, motivating values
usually reveals a smaller gap than initially perceived, and unpacking
those values can be educational for everyone involved.
"I think these programs present the Jewish community with a serious
opportunity to listen and to learn from these teenagers," said Zelkind
of the Jewish Teen Funders Network. "The best of these programs are
being used in that way rather than in guiding the teenagers to make the
kinds of decisions that their community leaders and parents would like
them to make."
It is that interplay between adults and teens that makes these programs
attractive -- kids are handing out large sums of money, and the adults
who want that money, or who want to see that money disbursed
intelligently, must treat teens seriously whether on site visits, at
the dinner table, or in the board room. Kids, in turn, learn how to
behave in adult milieus.
"The bottom line is it's about empowering young people to be a part of
the solution in our community. So many times young people are seen as
the problem, but this helps people understand that our teens have a lot
to offer and that their perspective is really valuable," said Lisa
Farber Miller, who runs one of the largest such programs, the Rose
Youth Foundation in Denver, which disburses $50,000 a year during seven
months of meetings.
Miller says some program alumni have chosen public advocacy work
because of their experience at the youth foundation, and for many kids,
it's an entry point to Jewish life for kids who are done with bar or
bat mitzvah training and may not be interested in youth group or more
Hebrew school.
"It is keeping kids connected to the Temple whom we otherwise might
have lost," said Rabbi Laura Geller of Temple Emanuel in Beverly Hills,
where MATCH -- Money and Teenagers Creating Hope -- a four-year-old
teen foundation, pulled in 47 kids this year. "Some of them use MATCH
as a door back into the synagogue and get involved in the youth group
or as teachers' aides in our religious school. For other kids, MATCH is
their only connection to the Temple, but it is still enough of a
connection that they turn to their rabbis to write letters of
recommendation for college and even stay in touch once they go away to
school."
MATCH entrusts kids with a $250,000 endowment, which spins off about
$10,000 in grants a year. The kids are also required to put in $72 of
their own to participate in the process, which involves seven Sunday
meetings that combine Torah study around Jewish values with hands-on
research. The teens and their parents also attended a reception where
they met with leading philanthropists.
Involving the family in the process is a common thread among many of these programs.
At Pressman Academy's philanthropy class for seventh-graders,
inaugurated last year, a family interview is an integral part of a
year-long curriculum.
"School is not just about educating the student, but educating families
as well," said Pressman headmaster Rabbi Mitch Malkus. "Children might
know that giving is a priority in their family, but I don't know if
families actually sit down together and say 'where are we going to give
and why are we going to give to these places.'"
Layered on top of an existing tikkun olam curriculum and social action
program, the philanthropy class taught the kids about the
organizational structures of the Jewish community and the Jewish values
behind giving. Philanthropist Marilyn Ziering addressed the class, and
the kids did their own research to decide how to allocate $2,000.
The $2,000 came from a bar/bat mitzvah gift fund that parents
contributed to so that each student receives a gift from the fund,
rather than one from every classmate. In fact, the inevitable focus on
money surrounding the celebration -- expensive party, generous cash
gifts, attention heaped on one kid -- makes the bar/bat mitzvah year a
ripe time to open a discussion on philanthropy.
"For us it's a strategic decision, trying to transform an event that is
a traditional kind of life marker into an opportunity to get down to
core Jewish values," Malkus said.
"This is the first time most of these kids will have that much money
and have to make decisions about how to use that money. We hope to set
the foundation of a lifetime of giving."
Getting teens into the habit of giving is the goal of the B'nai Tzedek
Teen Philanthropy Program, run by the Harold Grinspoon Foundation in
Massachusetts. The Grinspoon Foundation has helped 36 communities set
up programs where local foundations match a bar or bat mitzvah kid's
own contribution to set up an endowment of $500, for which the child is
responsible. The program usually includes educational programs and
networking, so the kids can become part of a community of givers.
While initially the endowment only spins off about $25 of grant money
annually, it keeps the kids involved indefinitely, as opposed to youth
foundation models, which end with high school. Many participants, who
started their funds more than 10 years ago, when the program began,
have been adding to the principal and continue to allocate grants every
year.
"I think B'nai Tzedek creates kids who are connected to their
communities, kids who are connected to giving and this keeps them on
the map Jewishly even after their bar mitzvahs," said Gail Lansky,
national director of the B'nai Tzedek program at the Harold Grinspoon
Foundation.
In fact, youth philanthropy in general has been such a successful tool
of engagement, it is moving back up the generational ladder: The Jewish
Community Foundation in San Diego -- one of the first in the country to
have a youth foundation -- has brought the Hillel crowd into the
picture. And the Rose Foundation in Denver has constituted sub-boards
for community foundations made up of people in their 30s and 40s.
"I'm sure they will be opening our eyes to new and different things,"
said Miller of the Rose Foundation. "We are hopeful that they will be
social change agents, and create the kind of Jewish community they
want."
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