By Joel Magalnick, Editor, JTNews
When Lisa Lepson breezed through Seattle last month, she wanted to talk to local Jewish organizations that have been spurring innovation in Jewish life and culture. Lepson’s goal, simply put, is to give away a million bucks over the next five years to organizations that further Jewish engagement.
The reality, of course, is much more complicated. Lepson is the new executive director of Joshua Venture Group, an organization that began a decade ago as an incubator for such well-known organizations as Heeb magazine and JDub Records — as well as some less-publicized organizations such as Storahtelling and Sharsheret, which helps young women cope with breast cancer — before taking itself offline when its own funding ran out.
The organization regrouped and relaunched this year with Lepson, herself a social entrepreneur many times over, at the helm, four funders who want to see greater involvement in Jewish life, and a mission that will bring together what it calls visionary leaders from innovative organizations and provide them with “a social entrepreneurs toolkit.”
That consists of “concrete tools and resources to help them to achieve their goals and to manage to build healthy and stable organizations,” Lepson said.
Within this toolkit will come two retreats per year that will bring in experts to help these visionaries with such nuts-and-bolts issues like the all-important elevator pitch, creating business strategies, and working through growing pains.
But what any emerging business needs to get off the ground is money.
So in addition to the toolkit comes what Joshua Venture calls “early stage capital”: $40,000 each year over the two-year incubation period plus stipends for health insurance.
For some venture capitalists in the for-profit world, this kind of payout might cover lunch, with drinks. Yet for a nonprofit with what it sees as an important mission but without the initial money to hire the staff to pull it off, that kind of money is no small potatoes. And like startup companies that find further investors after leaping over that initial hurdle of finding their first, being recognized and funded by Joshua Venture Group can easily be a stepping stone to reaching a higher level in funding and fulfilling its mission.
“I think that we do have a really important role to play in terms of helping support really great ideas from [an] early stage to getting to a point that more established funders are interested and feel comfortable in investing with them,” Lepson said.
While in Seattle, Lepson met with Tana Senn, director of marketing at the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle, as well as with members and staff of the Kavana Cooperative.
Though Senn said the Federation didn’t have any specific projects that might be appropriate for Joshua Venture Group’s program, “I think it’s pretty cool what they’re doing,” she said. “We directed a couple people her way we thought might be particularly interested.”
Rabbi Rachel Nussbaum, executive director of Kavana, said her organization would be applying. Though Kavana and Nussbaum herself, both of whom have won several high-profile awards, are no strangers to grant-writing, Nussbaum said she was intrigued by how Joshua Venture is trying to advance thought within the Jewish world.
“They’re providing a peer group, essentially, of Jewish entrepreneurs,” she said. “It’s trying to take business skills [and] business thinking and applying those to solving problems creatively within the Jewish world.”
Lepson’s Seattle presentation drew 15–20 people, many with ideas of their own they would be interested in advancing.
“Seattle’s a culture of innovation and not afraid of startups,” she said, “so we wanted to include [the city] in our plan to generate awareness and generate applications.”
Even as they are still putting their own name out there, Joshua Venture has opened discussions with other small incubators in New York and Los Angeles, among others for building partnerships, as well as with 21/64. That organization works with family foundations to help them direct their money to Jewish causes, and prints the annual Slingshot guide of what it sees as the top 50 innovative Jewish organizations, some of whom have been Joshua Venture alumni.
“Out of the 50 that are in that book, they gave out ten $10,000 grants. Two out of that 10 were to Joshua Venture alumni,” Lepson said.
Despite Lepson’s excitement about generating awareness, getting a spot in the 2010-2012 Joshua Venture cohort won’t be easy. With only eight slots available, competition will likely be fierce.
In addition, where most grants are limited to nonprofits, Joshua Venture has opened the field to not just early-stage nonprofits, but to projects within existing organizations, and for-profit companies.
They will be looking for organizations that have what Lepson called “the multiplier effect,” or in essence, how the direct beneficiaries from any given program might go out and educate many more on what they have just learned. What’s most critical is that the leader is committed to the project.
“Our goal is to cast the net as wide as possible,” she said. “We’ve removed the age constraints, we’ve removed organizational constraints, it can be a for-profit, it can be a project within an established organization. So our goal is we’re really seeking a person, a project, a really dynamic leader, and someone who can take a really exciting and unique idea to sustainability or to significant impact.”
Not everyone is convinced that the recent spate of innovation is actually innovation, however.
“It’s easy to appoint yourself a social entrepreneur, but you need to earn it,” said Gali Cooks, director of the Stanley Kaplan Family Foundation at a Dec. 1 panel discussion on philanthropy and young Jews, according to a report by the JTA World News Service. “It’s not like Wendy Kopp [the founder of Teach for America] finished her dissertation and said, ‘OK, I am a social entrepreneur.’ You need 10 years of dirt under your fingers. I don’t like it when people just use language.”
JTA reported that “Cooks gets the feeling that self-described social entrepreneurs often believe that they are inventing the wheel while in truth most of the projects have been tried in one way or another. The independent minyan movement, for instance, is not all that far off from the Havurah movement of the 1970s.”
Cooks referenced Joshua Venture specifically, noting that a similar organization existed in the environmental movement.
But Kavana’s Nussbaum said the reemergence of this incubator is positive for the growth of Jewish communal life, whether her organization is selected for the upcoming cohort or not.
“Joshua Venture Group’s reconstituting itself and coming back promotes the whole field, which is good for Kavana,” she said.
For more information on the Joshua Venture Group and applying to become a part of the 2010 cohort, visit www.joshuaventuregroup.org.