• Erika Davis, former Pursue temp and the blogger behind Black Gay and Jewish, published a piece on the Sisterhood blog this week about getting the Jewish community to deal honestly with internal racism. Recounting many experiences in which she has been perceived as an outsider in Jewish settings, Davis calls on the community to have this admittedly difficult conversation in order to make these experiences a thing of the past.
   
• On Monday, clergy and people of faith across the country will begin a 23 Hour Fast to End 23 Hour Solitary. Organized by the National Religious Campaign Against Torture, the fast coincides with the first-ever Congressional hearing on the practice of solitary confinement in prisons. To participate in this and other Torture Awareness Month activities from a Jewish lens, visit the resource page compiled by Rabbis for Human Rights-North America.
   
• AJWS’s recent Where Do You Give? National Design Competition, aimed at reframing the concept of tzedakah in the 21st century, recently named Chicagoan Doug Burnett as the competition’s grand prize winner. In articles for the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Jewish News, Burnett, who is Mormon, explained how entering the competition has taught him about Judaism and his own role in making change: “I hope in some very small way, my talent can help other people, make some small change in the world and encourage other people to do things through advertising and design.” To attend the kick-off event for the competition’s mobile tour this coming Wednesday, June 20 in New York City, click here.
   
• While the Senate is deliberating on the 2012 Farm Bill this week, the Jewish community continues to amplify its voice in favor of food justice-friendly components in the bill. The Jewish Platform for a Just Farm Bill is now signed by 20 organizations, and the Jewish Petition for a Just Farm Bill–with approximately 18,000 signatures–was delivered yesterday to members of Congress. In addition, AJWS President Ruth Messinger had her letter to the editor of the New York Times about international food aid published this week.

This post originally appeared on the Where Do You Give? blog.

 
We just couldn’t hold it in any longer.

It’s time to announce our Grand Prize Winners! Not to mention our Student Track Winners and some Honorable Mentions who we just had to recognize for their amazing work.

Make sure to congratulate them in the comments below!!!

GRAND PRIZE WINNERS:
Tzedakah Box Category:
Doug Burnett is an art director from Chicago, IL. His “Vending Box” paints a dystopic picture of our current spending and donor habits. As Doug explains in his artist statement, “We buy a soda without batting an eye but, ironically, we turn a blind eye toward a $1 donation.” After inserting a coin, participants choose a beneficiary. A screen on the back side of the box shows a video of that individual and the benefit he or she will receive as a direct result of the donation.

Out of the Box Category: 
Lily Feinberg is a graphic designer from Atlanta, GA who currently lives in Washington, D.C. Her large-scale sculpture functions both as a receptacle for tzedakah and as a catalyst for community engagement in local causes and reflection on the act of giving. The structure physically spells out the word “change,” a word that indicates its contents as well as its ultimate function. The dual meaning of this word prompts tzedakah givers to associate more closely the act of physically giving money to the impact it actually can have.

Web/Interactive Category:
Michael Cohn Moreau is a software engineer from Nashville, TN. Michael’s “Discover Needs” tags are QR codes meant for grocery stores. Shoppers scan the codes to learn about issues that are directly connected to the products they’re buying. For example, a shopper purchasing insect repellant can scan the QR code to learn about malaria in the developing world. Then, the shopper can be immediately directed to learning about organizations that are working to fight malaria, and can choose to donate to that organization right then and there, or save the information to learn more later.

SPECIAL JURY PRIZE:
Sam Holleran is an artist living in New York. His tzedakah box “acknowledges the sometimes tenuous place that charity holds in our lives. While some money will inevitably fall out of this box the vast majority of the coins will cling together due to their mass. This leaves most of the ‘deposit’ intact for the intended recipient of the giving but it also allows for some monies to slip out. The coins that pass through the cracks are not ‘lost’ but volunteered to those who need help but may be too proud to ask. In some cases these may be the very folks who donated in the first place. Just as a family in need is apt to dip into their own piggy bank this design features a built-in safety valve—a way to get money out without breaking the whole.”

HONORABLE MENTION:
Grace Robinson-Leo and Rob Matthews are both graduate students in the Graphic Design Program at Yale University. Their “Charity Plan” uses an online platform for paying your phone bills (something most of us already use) as a way to create a habit and awareness of giving. Mobile phone users choose to pay one cent per minute of these otherwise free calls to charities of their choosing, based on who they are speaking with. For example, a user might choose to donate to a breast cancer charity everytime they talk to their mother. As the designers note, “Talking is our most social interaction. What if it was also socially beneficial? What if the conversations we had about philanthropy were philanthropy?”

STUDENT TRACK WINNERS:
Beth F., age 15 from LaGuardia High School in NY
Ari G. age 16 from Gann Academy in MA
Samantha S. age 16 from Great Valley High School in PA

Giving doesn’t look like it used to. Our sense of community is evolving and expanding. We give globally as much as locally and the technology of giving has certainly gone beyond doling out coins.

Earlier this year, American Jewish World Service brought together talented designers nationwide to translate the concept of tzedakah - Judaism’s imperative to give to those in need – into compelling, relevant design. The Where Do You Give? National Design Competition challenged designers, artists and conceptual thinkers to create a 21st century icon inspired by the values and imagery of the traditional tzedakah box that reflects our increasingly interconnected, global and technologically accelerated world.

Join us on June 20 as we kick off a national exhibit of winning designs from the competition and celebrate a new movement toward thoughtful, imaginative and inspired giving.

Wednesday, June 20
7:00 to 9:00 p.m.
92YTribeca
200 Hudson Street
New York, NY

Speakers include Rebecca Stone, Karen Pittelman, Ryan Clifford. Facilitated by Sasha Feldstein.

RSVP here.

This event is co-hosted by Pursue and AJWS Global Circle.

Speakers:

Rebecca Stone: Rebecca currently serves as the Director of Community Engagement for Encounter, overseeing fundraising, communications, and VIP recruitment. Before joining Encounter, Rebecca spent three and a half years in major gifts fundraising at American Jewish World Service (AJWS), growing a portfolio from $300,000 to over $2 million. A grad­uate of Yeshiva University (YU), Rebecca received the Presidential Fellowship and spearheaded student-led social justice initiatives for both YU students and the modern Orthodox community at large. Rebecca served as co-chair of Limmud NY’s marketing committee and has served as the fundraising chair of AJWS’s Global Circle. Rebecca is currently enrolled in a three-year training to practice an integrated psychology and neuroscience-based approach to trauma healing and is passionate about philanthropy, social justice and peace building.

Karen Pittelman: Karen Pittelman is the author of Resource Generation’s Classified: How to Stop Hiding Your Privilege and Use It For Social Change and co-author of Creating Change Through Family Philanthropy. In 1999, at the age of 25, she dissolved her $3 million trust fund to co-found the Chahara Foundation, a fund run by and for low-income women activists in Boston. She’s been organizing people with class privilege ever since. She lives in Brooklyn where she works as a writer and a writing coach, and sings with her country band Karen & The Sorrows.

Ryan Clifford: Ryan Clifford served as a judge for the Where Do You Give? National Design Competition. Ryan Clifford teaches in MICA’s undergraduate Graphic Design program, is Faculty Director of the MICA Design Coalition and is graduate faculty in the Master of Arts in Social Design program. He serves as the Associate Director of MICA’s Center for Design Practice, a multi-disciplinary studio dedicated to preparing the next generation of design leaders through socially conscious projects using design to translate ideas into tangible outcomes with the goal of changing behaviors and making a positive impact on society. He is an advisor for Project M, an international social design initiative which is committed to helping young designers use their skills to create positive change in the world. His work has been recognized by the National Paperbox Association and the Rochester Advertising Foundation and in the following publications: How International Design Annual, Print Regional Design Annual and the book Indie Publishing.

Facilitator, Sasha Feldstein: Sasha Feldstein works in the department of education and community engagement at American Jewish World Service, and is the project manager for Where Do You Give? Prior to working at AJWS, she participated in AJWS’s Volunteer Corps by living and volunteering with Heshima Kenya in Nairobi.

This post originally appeared on the HuffPost Religion Blog.

Like many people in my generation, I first associated tzedakah, the Hebrew word for charity, with the pushke — the little metal box given out in Hebrew school, rusting on my parents’ windowsill. I learned in the 1950s that Jews were supposed to collect pennies in the pushke to plant trees in Israel. There was no passion or intensity embedded in this ritual; no real understanding of the values or texts behind this seemingly strange act of generosity; and no opportunity to innovate. It was just something Jews did.

The truth is, no one in my family talked much about giving money; they talked about giving time. My parents and grandparents devoted untold hours to serving on the boards of local Federation agencies — an ethic that has deeply informed my own professional and personal commitments.

But, of course, time isn’t the only marker of giving. Money matters, too. It matters a lot. Money defines our needs, our wants and our luxuries. It shapes our responsibilities and informs our life choices. Subsequently, I discovered that my parents were, in fact, giving money — but it was apparently not a subject for “polite” conversation.

My parents’ perception was misguided. We need to talk about money and it shouldn’t be considered “taboo.”

About 15 years ago, I decided that I wanted to raise my grandchildren’s consciousness about money early on in their lives. Beginning on their ninth birthdays, my husband and I started giving each grandchild $100 to donate to causes or organizations of their choice during the year. For me, the cause itself — be it animal rights, marriage equality, children’s mental health or ending genocide in Darfur — is less important than the questions and values that inform their decisions. Which issues do they care about and why? How do they determine who needs their money most?

American Jewish World Service’s Where Do You Give? initiative has pushed these questions into the Jewish communal spotlight to spark a national conversation about giving in the 21st century.

Central to Where Do You Give? is a national competition that called upon artists to translate tzedakah’s meaning into a compelling, relevant design — far beyond the pushke on the windowsill.

AJWS received dozens of amazing submissions for the competition and I, along with our distinguished panel of judges, have now narrowed them down to nine finalists.

Many of the submissions were conceived in an effort to cut through the morass of what people look at every day and focus their attentions on giving. One entry is a large public installation that cleverly plays with the meaning of the word “change” and another seeks to elevate the grocery shopping experience so that people can understand and engage with issues related to their everyday purchases.

But I particularly love the submissions that seem designed to get people together to have these discussions — whether it is through a community baking project, computer game or an interactive pixel map.

Looking at these pieces of art gives me great hope that a new generation of globally conscious designers are celebrating the critical role that tzedakah plays in today’s world and that the next generation of Jews will both give and talk about giving. Working for justice depends on re-imagining the possibilities for this work. It requires that we take a good, hard look at the values that animate our philanthropic choices.

AJWS will announce the Where Do You Give? grand prize winners on May 15.

Ruth Messinger is the president of American Jewish World Service.

• A seder at the White House? Not only that, but a focus on food justice: 50 representatives of the Jewish community from across the country participated in a seder last week with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the White House. The celebration included a tomato on the seder plate to recognize migrant farm workers who are often unable to provide food for their own families. Participants read from a haggadah focused on hunger and poverty prepared by Bend the Arc, speaking to USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack’s staggering figure that 17 million U.S. households are food insecure.
   
• Missed out on enjoying a seder at the White House? Not to worry: President Obama’s Passover message is available for viewing on YouTube. For a glimpse into the Obamas’ own seder, held last Thursday night and using the notorious Maxwell House Haggadah, click here. The Chicago Sun-Times’ post provides a listing of “who’s who” from the Jewish community attending the seder and the history of the Obamas’ seder tradition.
   
• In further Passover justice inspiration, Freelancers Union founder (and Meet the Change speaker) Sara Horowitz wrote a piece in the Atlantic describing the Exodus from Egypt as “the first great moment in labor history.” Describing Moses as “history’s first union representative,” she lists a new set of the Four Questions that brings the lessons from winning the Israelites’ freedom from slavery to struggles for labor rights today.
   
• This Passover, as we think about passing over the heritage of the Jewish people to the next generation, the future of Jewish philanthropy is also about to change hands from one generation to the next. The Jewish Chronicle describes the tension that this transfer might create between Jewish foundations giving to Jewish causes and non-Jewish, often justice-oriented, causes. AJWS’s Aaron Dorfman thinks this tension should not be alarming: “We should be doing both [kinds of giving], and more of it.”

• Breaking news: several Jewish social justice activists, including AJWS’s associate director of advocacy, Ian Schwab; the Religious Action Center’s Rabbi David Saperstein, and the Jewish Council for Public Affairs’ Rabbi Steve Gutow, were arrested today along with actor George Clooney, Martin Luther King III and members of Congress in front of the Sudanese embassy in Washington, D.C. The group was protesting the Sudanese government’s blockage of humanitarian aid to its citizens. To see photos as they come in, check out the RAC’s Facebook album, and read this article in the Jewish Journal for more context on the protest.
   
• It’s here! The voting period for the 70+ submissions received in the Where Do You Give? National Design Competition opened yesterday. You can vote once a day in each category – Tzedakah Box, Interactive, and Out of the Box – through March 30th. The submission with the most votes in each category will become one of the finalists and be a part of the national exhibit kicking off this summer, with the potential of winning the Grand Prize. You can also view all the submissions and descriptions on Where Do You Give?’s Facebook album.
   
• Moment Magazine asked a number of prominent Jews a big question for its March/April 2012 issue: What does the concept of the Messiah mean today? This complex and often fraught theological question was answered by everyone from AJWS’s Ruth Messinger to author Shalom Auslander and actress/neuroscientist Mayim Bialik. For a justice spin, here’s a peek at Ruth’s response:  “The notion of a messiah is that in a time of troubles—which is what we have now—we are called on to do much more, in partnership with each other and with a world force, to make things better.”
   
• Here in the U.S., patrons of kosher restaurants are becoming more and more familiar with the Tav HaYosher – Pursue, for instance, purchases only Tav-certified food for our events. But did you know that the Tav HaYosher has its origins in the Tav Chevrati, an Israeli ethical certification for restaurants? Read Katie Greenberg’s article from earlier this week about taking the Tav pledge in Jerusalem here, and click here to learn more about the standards and background behind this “social seal.” And if you’re in New York, you can celebrate the Tav HaYosher’s 100th certification at the FesTAVal!

• This week, Jewish social justice activists had the happy occasion of Purim coinciding with International Women’s Day. Two articles this week in particular highlight the incredible women that AJWS is honored to work with: a blog post by World Partners Fellow Justine Dowden about her colleague Maya and education for girls in India; and The Daily Beast’s list of 150 Fearless Women, which includes Leymah Gwobee, Nobel Peace Prize winner and director of AJWS partner organization Women Peace and Security Network-Africa.
• Submissions for the Where Do You Give? National Design Competition are due today by midnight! For some last-minute inspiration, check out this week’s post on the project’s blog by Lisa Goldstein about giving out of a sense of pity versus a feeling of generosity. She examines the pitch of a homeless man asking for change on the subway as an example. What about you – are you more motivated to give by fear or gratitude?
• In the continuing fight for food justice, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, fresh off their victory with Trader Joe’s, is sparing no time in moving ahead with its next target: supermarket chain Publix. Right now, farmworkers and allies are participating in a six-day fast to put pressure on Publix to sign the Fair Food Agreement. Rabbinical student Arielle Rosenberg, who visited Immokalee with Rabbis for Human Rights-North America and is fasting in solidarity, links this effort to Jewish fasts for justice in a blog post for State of Formation.
   
• The first set of grants for 2012 has been awarded to innovative projects devised by alumni of the Bronfman Youth Fellowships in Israel. The eight projects selected as part of the Alumni Venture Fund make an impact from coast to coast in the U.S. as well as in Israel. A social justice highlight among the grantees is a new project of Keshet to expand their LGBTQ-inclusivity training to staff and leaders of campus Hillels. Congratulations to all of the awardees!

• Not surprisingly, the food justice victory by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) last week—in which Trader Joe’s finally signed a Fair Food agreement after years of CIW organizing—has made big news in the Jewish social justice world. While we covered the story of the tomato rabbis who visited Immokalee just last week, you can read additional coverage of their visit and the victory in the Forward’s The Jew and the Carrot blog, the Bay Area’s J Weekly, and the Huffington Post. And what will change as a result of this victory? “This is nearly a 50 percent raise for the workers,” said Barry Estabrook, author of Tomatoland.
   
• There are just 12 days left to submit your brilliant new idea for reimagining the traditional tzedakah box to the Where Do You Give? design competition! For inspiration, turn to the Where Do You Give? blog: last week, professor Deborah Skolnick Einhorn wrote about the tension between philanthropic funding of social services versus social change work, which can often address the root causes that create the need for social services in the first place. Given the current small percentage of U.S. philanthropy devoted to social change, she raises a challenging question: “Are there enough resources to really cure the root causes of day-to-day problems?”
   
• AJWS and Repair the World have teamed up for a new blog series called Shabbat Service. Each Friday, the series summarizes the weekly Torah portion and provides a tangible suggestion for applying its lessons for justice in today’s world. This week’s parsha, Mishpatim, contains the famous justice-oriented verse, “You shall not wrong or oppress a stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Exodus 22:20). Click here to learn more and take action on this obligation to help others as expressed in the parsha.

Turning the World Right Side Up:
Purim & the Strategy of Generosity

A Jewish Social Justice Weekend featuring Danny Siegel
March 9 – 11, 2012

The holiday of Purim is full of the upside-down, and inspires us to have the courage to do our part to set it right side up. There is a connection between Purim’s traditions of mishloach manot (sending gifts) and matanot l’evyonim (gifts to the poor), and the strategy of generosity that is a core element of Jewish tradition. In Judaism, the strategy of generosity is called by many names, including tzedakah (justice or charity), gemilut hasidim (giving kindness), and tikkun olam (fixing the world).

In our giving of gifts on Purim, we enact the strategy of generosity, and in the larger sense of pursuing social justice, we recognize the need for an inversion in society, a turning upside down of the inequalities we see. By engaging in social action on Purim, we hope to erase the hierarchy of the haves and the have-nots. Esther is the heroine of the Purim story because she used kindness and generosity to fight against hatred and callousness. Purim celebrates the story of the human courage to stand up for what is right. For a special Purim weekend, we will emulate and celebrate Esther’s victory, in ages past, today, and in times to come.

We envision a community service project originating at Isabella Freedman, delivering our gifts in the spirit of generosity to the broader community. We want to represent the Jewish community that is giving, loving, generous, tolerant, open-minded, and creative. We interpret the Purim story as a victory for peaceful power, and seek to turn the world right-side-up again.

For more information and to register, please visit http://isabellafreedman.org/purim.

Presented in partnership with: 

This post originally appeared on The Jew and the Carrot.

It was the pile of onions that made me cry. Not in the way you might think—I wasn’t standing over a cutting board, knife in hand, sobbing my way through an extended dicing activity. The onions that made me cry were whole, bagged and stacked about 5 feet high, in a small village in Western Senegal, where I was travelling with American Jewish World Service.

It sounded like a success story. So why was I crying?

Because government subsidies of onion farmers in Holland brought down the price of their onions to such a degree that it was cheaper to import Dutch onions than to purchase the locally grown produce. These Senegalese onion farmers simply could not compete on price—and so the onions sat there, bagged and stacked, hostages to the inequities of a system far beyond their growers’ control.

This incident took place in June, nearly six months ago. Yet there are two reasons why it’s been looming large in my memory these days.

The first is where we are in the Jewish calendar. In a few weeks, we’ll celebrate Tu Bishvat, the holiday that has evolved in recent decades into the flagship holiday of the contemporary Jewish environmental movement. But originally, Tu Bishvat was tax day in Temple-centered Judaism. The Mishnah in Tractate Rosh Hashana refers to this day as the ‘New Year’ of the trees—namely, the date which a farmer determined which tax year her fruit crop belongs. Based on what year in the seven year agricultural system the fruit fell into, she would be obligated to allocate tithes for different purposes: to support the communal institutions and religious leaders of the Temple, to be brought as a thanksgiving offering to God, or be distributed amongst the poor in her local community.

These origins suggest that we can understand Tu Bishvat as a date on the calendar when we look at our resources— our stuff—with intention, and say: where does this go? How do I use this portion of my material wealth to support communal institutions, to deepen my relationship with God, to care for those in my community without? While many of us make our charitable contributions at the end of the secular calendar year, I like the idea of using Tu Bishvat as the day when I think about my annual allocations for giving, and set some resolutions in this area.

To continue reading this post on The Jew and the Carrot, click here.

Interested in learning more about the Farm Bill and Tu B’Shvat? Come to one of Pursue’s upcoming events! Click below for more info:

Chewing on Food Justice: The Farm Bill and You!
Tu B’Shvat Seder