Our Mission
In order to ensure that the Jewish people thrive and its values flourish, we must first ensure that Jewish education is the best that it can be in all of its variety.  JESNA’s role is to strengthen communities and their educational offerings by providing tested solutions, leveraging partnerships, promoting synergies, and building the connections that strengthen us all.  In partnership with education leaders, funders, and dreamers, JESNA draws on its 25 years of institutional experience and its expert staff to focus on a continuous cycle of improvement, progressing from learning to dissemination to active application in geographical and topical communities and back again. 

Programmatic Foci and Functions
Long-Term Priorities
Accomplishments
Priorities for 2007-08
Partnerships
Local Challenges

Programmatic Foci and Functions
JESNA equips communities and institutions with the knowledge and know-how they need in order to deliver engaging, high quality Jewish education.  We do this through three program units: 

• The Berman Center for Research and Evaluation in Jewish Education.  The Berman Center conducts state-of-the-art evaluations of educational programs to help sponsors improve these programs and to assess their effectiveness and impact.  The Berman Center also works with program providers to help them improve their abilities to conduct and utilize evaluations and to build a culture of data-driven decision-making throughout the continental system.

• The Learnings and Consultation Center (LCC).  The LCC disseminates knowledge about what works in Jewish education and under what circumstances to communities and institutions and helps them to apply this knowledge through one-on-one consultations, communities of practice, demonstration projects, web resources, publications, and special projects (such as educator awards).

• The Lippman Kanfer Institute: An Action-Oriented Think Tank for Innovation in Jewish Learning and Engagement.   The Lippman Kanfer Institute identifies and analyzes promising new directions in educational practice and policy and engages leaders in thinking about how to implement these innovations more widely.

Substantively, JESNA’s work addresses the major educational challenges and opportunities facing local communities and North American Jewry as a whole.  Our programs today focus on

• congregational education (as well as other ways of engaging non day-school children and families),
• youth (with a special emphasis on the role of communities in strengthening both formal and informal educational opportunities),
• educator recruitment, development, and retention,
• building the capacity of central agencies for Jewish education, and
• emerging issues such as “linking silos” (building connections between and among educational programs and venues), helping families access Jewish education, and strengthening Jewish peoplehood education. 

JESNA also continues, as it always has, to respond to the needs and requests of communities with information and guidance (including via community visits) on a broad range of educational issues.

During the past year, JESNA has discontinued one program: the Everett JewishJobFinder.com.  The job search / recruitment function of the JJF has been taken on by other web sites serving the Jewish community, and the site’s content on careers in Jewish education has been migrated to JESNA’s new online Professional Development Center (www.jesnapdc.org).

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Long-Term Priorities
Our long-term priorities grow out of the meshing of a set of bold goals that we have for Jewish education as a whole with our focused strategy (Learnings - Dissemination - Application) for maximizing JESNA’s impact on the community’s capacity to achieve these goals.

1. To increase overall participation in the full range of Jewish educational experiences by making these experiences more attractive, accessible, and high quality ( by “overall participation” we mean a) expanding the numbers of participants, b) expanding the number of experiences that each individual and family participates in, and c) extending participation throughout one’s life).
2. As a vital component of this, to increase the recruitment and retention of outstanding educators.
3. To enable the Jewish educational system to operate with empirically-grounded knowledge of “what works,” a culture of cooperation, and the readiness to innovate that will ensure its ongoing dynamism and effectiveness.

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Accomplishments

• Evaluations by the Berman Center for Research and Evaluation of more than 34 programs, adding to the total of more than 150 programs evaluated by the Berman Center over the past fifteen years.
• Inauguration of the new Publications and Dissemination Program to synthesize the fruits of these evaluations (and other sources) and bring these learnings to the field.  Two publications, on community high schools and mentoring, will be released this spring.
• Expansion of the Coaches Training Institute, preparing central agency personnel to support systemic congregational educational improvement.  Twenty-nine communities now participate in this project, which includes a thriving “community of practice” that provides professional development, resources, mentoring, and ongoing consultation.
• Establishment of NAACHHS, the North American Association of Community Hebrew High Schools, which includes 45 schools that participate in bi-monthly conference calls for resource and information sharing and problem-solving and is currently developing a set of web-based resources leading to its first national conference this July.
• Record participation of more than 60 undergraduate and graduate students in JESNA’s pioneering educator recruitment programs, the Lainer Interns program and Graduate Seminar.  These programs have compiled a remarkable track record over the past fifteen years, with over 60% of 337 alumni in the first nine cohorts who were surveyed currently working as professionals in Jewish educational and communal agencies.
• Sixty-seven new recipients of the Grinspoon-Steinhardt Awards for Excellence in Jewish Education from over forty communities.  They join a circle of over 320 educators from 60 communities who have been honored locally and nationally (at the UJC General Assembly), and have benefitted from the Awards program’s professional development seminar and stipend.
• The creation of PELIE, the Partnership for Effective Learning and Innovative Education, to spearhead the transformation of “complementary” (part-time) Jewish education.  PELIE was founded by a remarkable group of philanthropists working together with JESNA and the Jewish Funders Network, and is housed at JESNA.
• Rolling out of the first projects of the Lippman Kanfer Institute: Redesigning Jewish Education for the 21st Century, which has worked with a distinguished twenty-five person Advisory Council to develop a set of “design principles” and “change strategies” to keep Jewish education relevant and effective in a changing world, and Linking the Silos, formulating action steps to maximize educational participation and impact in an age of choice.  The Linking the Silos project is working closely with the original research team for the Avi Chai study and is holding an initial consultation with over one hundred participants in New York on May 7.
• Launch of the Professional Development Center, a comprehensive online resource for designers and deliverers of professional development activities, and a prototype for JESNA’s new web strategy now under development.
• Continuing support for communities and community-based educators through our work with the Association of Directors of Central Agencies, (ADCA) other professional networks, collaboration with organizations such as PEJE and UJC, and consultations and presentations for communities including New York, Baltimore, Detroit, Boston, Philadelphia, Cleveland, MetroWest, San Francisco and Denver.

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Priorities for 2007-08
JESNA’s priorities for 2007-08 build on the strategic direction and program achievements outlined above.  Key priorities are:

1. Full implementation of our plan to make the Learnings and Consultation Center a multi-dimensional “hub” for JESNA’s knowledge synthesis, dissemination, and application work.  This includes a completely redesigned and expanded web presence; a “knowledge codification” process that will create a rich storehouse of “lessons learned” for the field; and enhanced consultation capacity and additional dissemination activities targeting both communities and cohorts of professionals and lay leaders.
2. Intensified support for central agency capacity-building, including professional development, knowledge sharing, and lay leadership development.
3. Expanding evaluation training for communities and other program providers.
4. Undertaking a major effort to strengthen the education of children and families not in day school (including those currently receiving no Jewish education) through the coordinated efforts of JESNA, PELIE, ADCA and other partners.
5. Expanding the Lippman Kanfer Institute’s initiative to maximize educational participation and impact by helping communities more effectively link programmatic and institutional “silos.”

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Partnerships
Partnerships have been a central operating principle of JESNA since its inception, and today is no exception.  The partnerships in which we are currently involved are literally too extensive and diverse to detail fully here.  We work with national organizations, foundations, local agencies, academic institutions, and Israel-based entities.  A list of the most noteworthy of these partnerships includes:
1. UJC - We work closely with the UJC Renaissance and Renewal Pillar and UJC Consulting to coordinate on projects and community service activities in areas ranging from comprehensive community planning, to day school support, to “peoplehood”education.
2. UJC, JCCA, Hillel - These three national agencies are working together on a major initiative aimed at building stronger Jewish connections with and among “next generation” young adults.
3. ADCA (Association of Directors of Central Agencies) - JESNA both partners with and staffs ADCA, the representative organization of central agencies continent-wide.  We work together on ways to strengthen central agencies and their professionals, including meetings, newsletters, training and professional communities of practice.
4. CAJE (Coalition for the Advancement of Jewish Education) - JESNA and CAJE have embarked on a dramatic upgrading of our relationship that includes collaboration on an initiative to develop and test new models for strengthening educator recruitment and development in local communities and a jointly sponsored invitational deliberation at this summer’s CAJE conference.
5. PEJE (Partnership for Excellence in Jewish Education) - PEJE, JESNA, and UJC meet regularly to coordinate responses to local community issues affecting day schools.
6. PELIE (Partnership for Effective Learning and Innovative Education) - JESNA helped to give birth to PELIE, a funder partnership to improve “complementary” Jewish education and is now working intensively with PELIE to plan and implement a strategy to identify and disseminate “best in class” models of part-time Jewish education.

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Local Challenges
As noted above, since its creation, JESNA has focused on strengthening Jewish education in local communities through a close relationship with both federations and their central agencies for Jewish education.  JESNA has consistently provided guidance and support to help communities address particular issues that affect them locally, as well as continental leadership in dealing with issues that many communities are grappling with simultaneously (e.g., planning for Jewish continuity and renaissance).  We have worked and continue to work with communities one-on-one to help them deal with unique concerns ranging from problem solving with specific institutions that may be experiencing troubles, to developing new strategies in specific domains, to comprehensive community-wide planning.  In parallel, JESNA has produced and continues to produce reports and resources to inform local community action in nearly every important educational domain:  adult Jewish learning, youth education, day school, special needs education, congregational education, use of technology, and communal funding, coordination and educational support. 

Our key priorities today reflect what communities tell us are the most important challenges they face in being able to deliver quality Jewish education:

• Recruiting, training, supporting and retaining high caliber educators.  JESNA’s response: the Lainer Interns program, online Professional Development Center, community of practice for central agency professional development specialists, New England regional teacher development pilot project, Grinspoon-Steinhardt Awards, the Laboratory Communities Project on educator recruitment and retention, and the national study on Jewish teachers and administrators now underway.
• Substantially upgrading part-time Jewish education.  JESNA’s response: the Center for Excellence in Congregational Education, Coaches Training Institute, community leadership seminar, and Rabbinic training institute; support for PELIE; and work with ADCA on alternative approaches to engaging and educating non-day school children and families.
• Keeping teens engaged in Jewish learning and activity through the high school years. JESNA’s response: guiding the development of NAACHHS (association of community high schools); the community youth professionals network; and the development of tools like the tracking system for youth engagement initially developed by Kansas City as part of our Partnering Communities Program.
• Ensuring effective local educational planning and improvement initiatives.  JESNA’s response: capacity-buildingwith central agencies; community consultations; evaluations and evaluation training; and guidance to communities in “linking silos” to better coordinate efforts across institutional boundaries.

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Click here for a list of JESNA Staff or JESNA Board

Click here to view JESNA's Annual Report


JESNA is a national, non-profit agency governed by a board of directors comprised of lay and professional leaders in Jewish education from across North America, including individuals from the major Jewish religious movements. JESNA is a beneficiary of Jewish federations throughout North America and other private and communal funders.