Funders invest in teen philanthropists

NEW YORK (JTA) — The future of Jewish philanthropy just may lie in the hands of people like Rachel Levenson.
A 16-year-old junior at Gideon Hausner Jewish Day School in Palo Alto,
Calif., Rachel became a philanthropist at age 13. The school required
its seventh graders to research a local charity and write a personal
essay about it. At the end of the year, students had to pool their bar
and bat mitzvah money to allocate at least $800 to each of the
charities. In high school Rachel became a member of the
Peninsula Jewish Community Teen Foundation. With the foundation’s other
21 members, she helped collect some $40,000 during her freshman and
sophomore years through personal donations and fund-raising events and
matching funds from local philanthropies. Throughout each
year, the foundation met to discuss the logistics of allocating money
to charities. They then sent requests from a number of charities that
foundation board members thought were worthy. At the end of each year,
after researching 52 proposals, they made up to nine grants of up to
$7,500 each. Rachel now is an alumna adviser to the
foundation. She also was elected national treasurer of the United
Synagogue Youth’s International Social Action Committee, which will
allocate some $360,000 raised across the country by USY members.
She also recently collected $5,000 to start her own personal endowment
fund. As she begins looking at colleges, she wants to find one where
she can major in philanthropy. “This has opened us up to the
problems of the world,” Rachel said of her teen philanthropy experience
in a phone interview with JTA. “It’s made us realize that teens can
make a difference in the world if we put our minds to it.”
The idea of Jewish youth philanthropy has been around for a while. The
Harold Grinspoon Foundation, for instance, has been using its B’nei
Tzedek initiative since 1998 to set up teens in Western Massachusetts
with their own small endowment funds, from which they can allocate
money to charity. The Jewish Funders Network has been pushing the effort in recent years.
Some 50 Jewish youth philanthropy initiatives have cropped up around
the country, according to JFN. In April 2006, JFN set up the Jewish
Teen Funders Network, or JTFN, to act as a central clearinghouse for
such initiatives and provide professional training for those working
with them. Among the initiatives are Jewish youth foundations
like Rachel’s in Palo Alto. Others are run through Jewish day schools
that require seventh-grade students — in lieu of giving their friends
bar and bat mitzvah gifts — to donate money to a pool that they
allocate to different charities. These funds collectively
garner about $1.2 million a year, according to JFN, and the organization would like to see the number of programs grow, believing
that philanthropy is an effective way of teaching the next generation
about Jewish peoplehood. It has allocated up to $300,000 to
be paid out over the next three years to form 10 more programs, the
organization announced this week at JFN’s annual conference, which drew
350 philanthropists and heads of Jewish foundations to Atlanta. Along
with its teen affiliate, JFN will give communities $10,000 grants for
up to three years to form such programs. The grants will be
given to communities that are starting new groups for teens aged
13-18 or that want to form new branches of existing teen
foundations. The grants are contingent on the communities’ ability to
engage local philanthropists to provide matching funds.
That’s a key component, JFN President Mark Charendoff said, because
teens need to see that adults are trusting them with their own money
and with decisions on difficult topics that have real consequences.
“We are giving them our money and saying, ‘You’ve got to make the
decisions and those decisions are going to stand.’ We are proving to
them that we take their decisions seriously,” Charendoff said. “Then
they have to struggle with their peers and decide who gets preference:
Is it children in Darfur or hungry people in Beersheba? Is it Jewish
education in Columbus, Ohio, where they live, or social services
somewhere else?” Where other attempts to engage the young
generation have failed, Charendoff thinks philanthropy initiatives can
succeed because they’re so hands-on. In the end, it’s not
really about how much money the teens give out, JTFN Chairwoman Barbara
Lubran said, but about teaching them the fundamentals of philanthropy.
How effective such programs is unclear, because the phenomenon is too
young to tell how many teens move on to larger philanthropic roles when
they’re older, said Gary Tobin, president of the Institute for Jewish and Community Research, which studies Jewish philanthropy.
“If the goal of these programs is to teach young people about
philanthropy, they are probably going to be very successful over time,”
he said. “It’s something that needs to be taught. Sometimes you can
absorb it through osmosis. Other times you have to teach people to be
generous and charitable, and how to do it even if they have the impulse
to do it. Teaching them is a great idea. The question is how well do
you teach these teens these values over time.”