First meetings, issues and questions

I arrived at the AVODAH New York offices yesterday and went straight into meetings with various staff members, continuing today when I also had the chance to sit in on a meeting at the staff retreat and a Corps Members meeting in the evening.

So far I have met with Sarra Alpert (New York City Program Director), Rabbi Stephanie Ruskay (National Education Director), Mollie Spevack (Recruitment Coordinator) and Marilyn Sneiderman (Executive Director). Having also participated in a staff exercise, brainstorming ways that AVODAH can grow and increase its impact, I have heard a huge amount of information and realise just how many different factors there are to play with when considering any sort of UK programme model.

It seems the easiest way for me to order the issues and questions that have come up is to record them under broad headings. Starting with...

Staff and organisational structure

• According to our original proposal to the JHub "initial staff will be a professional project manager and a project director-advisor" with the project manager "doubling up as house contact & coordinator until AVODAH UK has the capacity to recruit a dedicated member of staff for this purpose." AVODAH in the US has seven staff members in its National Office alone, with a further twelve staff members on regional or affiliated assignments. One staff member told me they are both over-staffed and under-staffed i.e. there's a high level of separation of roles but they find they are stretched to do all the work.
• The question is really what staff and structure will AVODAH UK need? For example, will we need someone to work exclusively on participant recruitment and communications? Will we need someone to devote their time to the education component of the programme?
• Our funding will be limited (certainly less than the AVODAH budget) and our scale smaller (given the relative size of the UK Jewish community), so really the question is - what staff are absolutely necessary?
• There may well be ways to consolidate and save costs. For example, no doubt if we were to set up our new programme to replicate the way the current AVODAH houses are run we would need a separate programme director (including the role of house manager) in addition to the overall director of the AVODAH UK. However, one issue that came up is that of participant autonomy. Perhaps if the house was more self-governing it would need less management from AVODAH UK staff.
• Another way to save costs might be to partner more officially with AVODAH in the US, pooling resources and even sharing some program(me) staff. This raises the bigger issue of the relationship between AVODAH UK (or whatever it is called) and AVODAH. Whether we will in some way affiliate or exist as an independent international partner organisation is an area I will no doubt return to at a later point.

The house

• Jewish communal living, together in a house, is at the heart of AVODAH and also our plans for the UK project. AVODAH is almost alone in offering a program which combines working for social justice with the opportunity to live in Jewish community.
• We might, however, choose to organise the house and communal living aspect along different lines to our US cousins. For example, there are currently 18 Corps Members (i.e participants) in one house in Brooklyn, with most sharing a room with at least one other person. If we ran for similar numbers, would we be able to find a house so big? Can we offer a room per person or would that be too expensive? Other cities have split the group between two houses. Would this be a viable option for us or might it be too expensive or divisive in the group? I do expect we'll have fewer participants in our first cohort, so some of these questions may be somewhat moot.
• One very real issue is how we pay for the property. AVODAH in the US makes an agreement with a landlord. They don't own a property but they act as the tenants' agent, fully disclosing the nature of the program and sometimes acting as intermediary between the Corps Members and the landlord. They also furnish the house. If a donor such as the Pears Foundation could allow the use of one of their properties, the UK version of AVODAH could save a huge amount of programme costs, which could have a knock-on positive effect on making the participants affordable to the placement organisations and the programme affordable to the participants.

Communal living

• A number of decisions will need to be made regarding the nature of the communal living experience, including the boundaries and parameters set by AVODAH UK.
• Will the house be kosher? Vegetarian? Do we leave this up to the participants? AVODAH in the US kasher each house's kitchen at the start of the year, require that it is vegetarian for the orientation week, and then allow the Corps Members to determine their house's own level of kashrut, so long as it is as kosher as the most observant Corps Member. This I imagine works as the focus of the program is on the social justice work and then communal living for the Corps Members - not, as with Moishe House, on laying on events for other members of the Jewish community.
• AVODAH Corps Members are required to have two Shabbats per month i.e. at least two meals or events, over two separate Shabbats, at which all members should be present. Sometimes they choose to invite friends or program alumni, sometimes it's just them. I see the value in the requirement, as it helps to build and encourages the Jewish communal aspect of the program, especially as the group usually contains a variety of Jewish backgrounds and levels of knowledge and engagement. One general question for us is: what requirements would we need to make to our participants to create the kind of programme (Jewish communal, educational, justice-oriented) that we want?
• Related to this (or put another way): how much autonomy would we give the participants? One of the strengths and successes of say Moishe House is the degree of independence and autonomy enjoyed by the residents - giving residents the freedom to choose how they create their own communities has paid massive dividends. But AVODAH is a program in ways Moishe House isn't. The participants will likely be younger and the challenges of communal living while tackling poverty and oppression more intense.
• How would we ensure the right kind of blend among the group? Age, religious observance and gender are all factors here. AVODAH currently stipulate that applicants should be 21-26 years old. This is primarily to make living together a more fruitful, dare I say viable, experience.
• Meanwhile, there have been quite few orthodox applicants for the program. This may be to do with cultural expectations and priorities in various orthodox communities, but it's probably also due to mixed gender living arrangements and not knowing if the community will be 'halachic observance-friendly'. In the UK, where divisions between orthodoxy and non-orthodoxy are even more pronounced, how would we cultivate full cross-communal representation? One AVODAH staff member encouraged me to investigate getting the Office of the Chief Rabbi on board in some way - I explained the political difficulties this would involve but issues of affiliation and endorsement (including 'soft' endorsement) are very worth considering.
• There are generally more women than men on AVODAH. This is quite common in Jewish non-profit and social justice programmes. These are all issues for recruitment.
• Just to note, if we had the house in say Hackney, I anticipated one of its benefits would be reviving a sense of (pluralistic, forward-looking) Jewish community in the area. It was for this reason that I suggested in the proposal that participants could put on events once in a while (like a very part-time Moishe House). We will have to see if this is too far outside the programme's core remit: namely Jewish communal living and social justice work.