On Sunday morning, I will be on a flight to California for a professional gathering of rabbis who are part of a fellowship known as CLI, the Clergy Leadership Incubator. In addition to rabbinic training in the fields of adaptive leadership and synagogue innovation, part of the objective of the conference is to workshop and create an initiative for your community that is designed to have a lasting impact.
Last year, as a result of my involvement in this cohort, Etz Chaim launched the Mishpacha Project, an initiative that we piloted among select religious school and preschool groups. Using micro grants from the synagogue, designated Family Connectors spent the year organizing “low-barrier entry” social gatherings (with some Jewish content) designed to create family and community feel at Etz Chaim. One of our family connectors, Marisa Gewertz, took a group of parents to an art studio where parents made challah boards. Lauren Levetan and Courtney Nattis, two others, organized a potluck Shabbat dinner for a large group of parents and children. Jennifer Pila held a Sunday brunch during Religious School for parents of select grades to meet and greet.
It’s a ground-up, rather than top-down, approach to creating community. And we are already beginning to it pay dividends. The successful relaunch a few weeks ago of our Shabbat morning Tot Shabbat was not due to any of our top-down marketing, but was in large part due to members of our younger cohort coming together and seeking this need. Only last week I heard stories about families, who having gotten to know one another, chose to celebrate Seder or Shabbat together.
Having met with our Family Connectors on Tuesday, I can tell you that drawing off of last year’s success (with some tweaks, of course), we will be adding another grade level to the mix. We will also be making these micro-grants available to our Parents Raising Jewish Children group, a group designed to support interfaith families within our congregation.
Do you, as representative of a particular cohort, have an idea, a concept, or a way that you’d like to connect to our Etz Chaim mishpacha? I hope we’ll connect when I return from California next week.
