Executive Summary

The feasibility study is complete. This is the executive summary:

AVODAH was founded by Rabbi David Rosenn in 1998, and a group of activists and educators from across the spectrum of the American Jewish community. They were united by the sense that there was a disconnect between their involvement in Jewish life and their commitment to working for social change. Dedicated to the notion of "AVODAH" — a Hebrew word which encompasses spiritual, communal and work-related "service" — they joined forces to create the first and only Jewish service corps.

Concept and background

In August 2010 JHub commissioned me to conduct a three-month feasibility study into launching a residential social action and service organisation for Jews in their 20s in the UK, based on the AVODAH model launched in the USA in 1998. According to this model, participants “spend a year working on urban poverty issues as full-time employees in local non-profit organizations. During this year of service, participants live and study together, forming a community of people making a connection between social activism and Jewish life.

This feasibility study outlines research and development work carried out between September 2010 and January 2011, and presents a coherent plan for the set up of a new organisation under the working title of Avodah UK.

Key findings

Initial research suggests there is considerable appetite, across the full range of stakeholders, for a programme like Avodah UK.

The results of an online survey and interviews conducted with potential participants (i.e. current students and recent graduates) reveal a reasonable to high level of demand for a post-university (or equivalent) ‘sabbatical’ programme offering a Jewish community experience alongside ways into the charitable sector.

Through meetings and conversations with organisations addressing issues of urban poverty and social deprivation, a number of potential placements and partner organisations have been identified, including some already expressing a strong interest in taking on an Avodah UK participant.

The study has confirmed the most suitable location for the programme to be Hackney and/or Tower Hamlets, where there are: a high need for social action work, a well-established network of anti-poverty charities and NGOs, affordable housing, proximity to the City and corporate involvement, high appeal to young Jews seeking experience outside the traditional centres of Jewish life, connections to Jewish history, and the possibility of linking up with other communities to create an interfaith component.

The timing of the venture is apt. While the economic downturn and government spending cuts have increased pressure on NGOs and charities, hindering their ability to hire or subsidise new staff, some may view Avodah UK as an opportunity to bring in cheaper high-quality personnel. The proposed programme’s emphasis on community organising is very much in line with current trends and the recent rise of concepts such as ‘the Big Society’. Meanwhile, representatives of the Mayor’s Fund have expressed an immediate interest in encouraging Jews to take up social action work in London’s East End, and a partnership with the Jewish Volunteer Network, leading possibly to a pilot project with Avodah UK input, is already planned.

Importantly, AVODAH: The Jewish Service Corps, on which Avodah UK will be modelled, are also enthusiastic to support the project, offering their coaching, experience, management and expertise.

There is currently something of a zeitgeist in social justice year programmes for UK graduates and activists in their 20s – City Year and Mission Year, both fully established in the last twelve months, are examples in the wider secular and Christian communities. Avodah UK would add a strong, socially-progressive Jewish voice to the sector, facilitating positive community relations, enhancing the job prospects and skills of Jewish social activists, helping to tackle local poverty, and strengthening a meaningful, constructive Jewish identity among participants.

Given the current financial climate, the biggest challenge to the establishment of the programme may well be fundraising, especially convincing placements to contribute significantly to funding the participants working for them. However, if the project receives residency and support from JHub in 2011, initial prospects for achieving financial viability look positive.

It is recommended that a first cohort of six Avodah participants begin their placements in September 2012, giving the organisation sufficient time to promote the programme among students and equivalent, secure the best placements and partnerships, put in place a tailor-made curriculum, and collaborate across the Jewish and social justice communities. The number of participants will rise to eight for the second cohort and 10-15 for the third. Pending review of the first three years, Avodah UK will open new houses in other London or UK neighbourhoods, as appropriate to need, participant demand and organisational capacity.

City Year

Way back when I was first commissioned to do this feasibility study I met briefly with the organisers of City Year, another year-long service programme brought over from America. In short, participants spend a year working in inner-city London schools as tutors, mentors, role-models and leaders. At the time, they were just finishing a six-month trial, with just a handful of volunteers, but now they are up and running on a three-year pilot, with over 50 volunteers in six schools, in Hackney, Tower Hamlets and Islington. I met this week with Helena Price, Development Manager of the programme.

A number of things interest me with relation to Avodah:

• City Year provide their participants with a full month of training before starting in the schools and clearly impart a very distinctive way of working. They enter with a strong sense of what it means to be a City Year volunteer, reinforced throughout by everything from the uniform they wear to the book they're given outlining their techniques and games to the physical training exercises imported from the American parent organisation.

• Given the direct and distinctive work City Year volunteers carry out, City Year were able to use evidence of impact on US schools in order to recruit host schools in the UK. This is something I hadn't thought about before with Avodah. We should be gathering and utilising whatever evaluative evidence exists on the work of AVODAH: The Jewish Service Corps.

• Schools pay £8000 per year for a City Year volunteer. This is about what we would want from our placement organisations. The schools not only pay it - there is competition for participants.

• The programme is running initially on a three-year pilot i.e. fundraising, aims etc. have all been within this framework. This seems to me to make sense: it makes the project realistic, containable and focused, providing something to build on from here.

• While 'City Year' does not refer directly to the corporate world there have been food links to business. Corporations can sponsor a team (i.e. a group of participants working together in a single primary school), not only providing money but linking staff with that team's community projects, working alongside them on various pre-arranged days. The relationship needs to be handled carefully but this could be an excellent way of getting corporate involvement in Avodah.

• There is a formal relationship between City Year in the UK and the organisation in the US, ensuring the brand and reliability of service. We have not yet worked out what our relationship will be with AVODAH USA but I imagine it will be less formal than that.

Clearly City Year is a much bigger organisation than Avodah will be. They draw on a much larger pool of participants and have the backing of a very high profile American scheme and their brand. I do see them though as part of the 'service-year zeitgeist' in the UK at the moment, one that bodes well for our prospects.

Mission Year

I met two days ago with Susannah Clark, Project Manager for Mission Year, which is perhaps the most similar thing to AVODAH currently in existence in the UK.

Mission Year is a one-year programme for social-action minded Christian graduates, offering them the chance to live together and work for social justice in deprived areas of London. Their mission is "to see social and spiritual transformation in London" aiming "to enable you to make an effective impact on an urban community".

The meeting gave me a huge amount to think about of relevance to AVODAH:

• Instead of placing participants in one NGO or charity for the year, Mission partner assign their participants to a local church, who coordinate the social action work. That means, for one thing, the year also benefits the church community.

• Mission Year is also based on its US antecedent, who run the programme in eight cities. Mission Year US agreed for the UK programme - which is in its first year - to use the same name, but the organisations are 'friends' rather than officially franchised.

• Mission Year is aimed at the post-university market, partly because the pre-university market is quite flooded, but also because they hope participants will stay involved in their local church and community after they finish the programme.

• The major difference between the US and UK versions of the programme is that the UK organisation allows participants to come on board while working part- or full-time, so they can pursue their career and afford to support themselves. This was Mission Year's main method of overcoming the financial challenge faced in transferring a US-model heavily reliant on big budget philanthropy. Mission Year UK participants are asked to contribute £700 to their programme and are not given a subsidy for rent or living expenses. Rather those on the 'employment stream' help cover their house's costs and support both themselves and those on the 'volunteer stream'. So in every house there might be something like two full-time workers with one or two others who work part-time or volunteer full-time. It is this kind of creative solution than AVODAH UK may have to model.

• Susannah estimated a participant could just about cover rent and living expenses in inner-city London on £8,000 per year, with rent coming in at about £400 per person per week. The solution, however, does seem to work at the moment. Those on the 'employment stream' get stuck in on evenings and weekends (partly of course through their involvement in the local church) and help, creatively, to underpin new projects. How they share the house's and Mission Year 'family unit's' financial burden is left up to the house, without Mission Year stipulating the exact model.

• In this first year of the programme, there are 3-5 participants per house, in seven houses across London. This is a larger scale than I imagined AVODAH UK working on. Yes, the pool of Christian candidates constitutes a much bigger market than afforded by the Jewish community. But I imagine Mission Year are able to run on this scale partly due to the devolved management structure and church-partnering system.

• Participants will help their church to run food banks, debt counselling services (e.g. Christians Against Poverty), urban youth work (e.g. XLP) and the like, plus other social justice work the church is involved with. Mission year encourage the churches to get these kind of projects off the ground, but usually the church will already be involved in at least one of these organisations. Mission Year try to match up the needs of the church and the interests of the participant.

• If we were to borrow the church-partnering system and place participants with synagogues, there would be a number of questions. Is there the existing network of anti-poverty work run through synagogues? If not, could participants fulfill a community organiser-type role to foster such work? (David Russell of The Social Enterprise and Congregation of Jacob in Tower Hamlets, whom I spoke to on Wednesday, seems to think so.)

• One advantage of placing participants in already established small-scale religious communities is the churches (or synagogues if we adapt the model) are in it for the 'long-haul'. They have knowledge of the local culture and the programme is more sustainable year on year.

• Sometimes all the participants in one house are assigned to the same local church. Sometimes they are split between two or three churches, usually with good relations between them. (In Tower Hamlets there are 15 churches working together to run one food bank!) So participants often work together on projects as a team. This is quite different to AVODAH in the US, where individual corps members tend to have their own individual placement. Again, the question is whether such a network of cooperative synagogues exists in London. True, communities within single denominations work well together, but they are often geographically distant from each other. In some neighbourhoods there might be only one or fewer (!) synagogues around. Where there are more, would denominational politics be a problem? Then again, imagine if something like AVODAH could develop greater cooperation between communities that have traditionally not worked together!

• Like AVODAH, Mission Year provide a full curriculum of training and support for participants, with a focus on key skills for social engagement. Like AVODAH, they often start with some biblical text work or theology, leading into practical learning for activism. They have utilised a Christian training programme, Love is a Verb, which explicitly inspires and equips Christians to put their faith into action in tough places. While I don't think such a comprehensive equivalent exists in the Jewish world, projects like Matt Plen's and Maurice Glasman's Jewish Community Organising initiative are perhaps the beginning of training packages we can use.

• Some Mission Year participants choose to have a one on one spiritual and practical mentor for the year, someone from within their assigned church community. Mentoring is well-established in Jewish leadership programmes and would probably be a good idea.

• While the church takes responsibility for a good deal of the participant's management and day-to-day, Mission Year are free to provide things like personal support - often the participant will need an outside ear, to chat about any issues that have come up in the house or community or getting used to London.

• Mission Year currently models a skeleton staff structure (in contrast to AVODAH USA), Susannah working four days per week, her colleague Jess liaising with churches (2.5 days per week) and a Director on one day a week taking care of the bigger picture, strategy and fundraising. They have also used interns (two on three months each) who, incidentally, were paid £50 per week (useful to note when considering what NGOs and charities might be willing to pay for an AVODAH participant).

• Mission Year started in January 2010 with the first house launched in September, so the team had nine months to take care of participant recruitment (time-consuming but important, with full interviews screening out unsuitable candidates), marketing (it was easy to get churches to come on board but a bigger task reaching potential participants), designing the programme, website, developing the training and building relationships with the churches. If all goes according to plan, we will launch AVODAH as an organisation in April or May 2011 with the first cohort starting in September 2012 - a more sensible period of lead-in!

• Susannah says 25 participants in seven houses is a manageable number. She is able to give them the necessary time, meeting with each once a term... which, as well as providing pastoral support, is a way of evaluating the programme as it runs.

• Finding housing has proved one of the biggest difficulties and is also something I expect we will find a challenge. In the USA, AVODAH houses its corps members in houses of nine or 18. I called Hackney estate agents the other day and discovered most of them have never come across rentals of more than five bedrooms. Mission Year, running numerous houses, have been able to split the total cohort into houses of three to five participants each, but even finding four to five bedroom houses has been hard. The participants, church and Mission Year work together to try to find the place, with Susannah copied into all house-hunting emails.

• Apparently buying the houses outright would be the ideal - to find big investors to purchase the properties. Is this something I should be costing, as a possible route for AVODAH UK?

• Participants are encouraged (rather than forced) to institute certain practices to build and ease community life - for example, eating one meal together per week and praying together now and then. Scheduling 'us time' is something we've found really useful running Moishe House London, and Shabbat is a fantastic opportunity for community bonding. Note AVODAH USA require corps members to spend at least one meal one Shabbat per month together.

• I was interested that Mission Year had only just started, as has City Year. Also considering this feasibility study, why is this zeitgeist taking place? Susannah suggested there is a recognition that to change places you have to move into them, while at the same time it's related to economic disillusionment. Graduates want another lifestyle, another way, rather than the old city careers, which are in any case becoming harder and harder to come by. There is an increased hunger for community and an increased awareness of poverty on our doorstep. We will see what Jewish students say regarding the proposed programme, through the survey and some focus groups I'll be conducting in the coming weeks, but Mission Year discovered students were very excited about the community element. They said they want to do things as a team and share more of their lives. This was certainly part of our motivation three years ago, setting up Moishe House London.

• It's important for participants to realise what they are committing to, to manage the expectations of all parties. So Mission Year have developed a values statement for participants to sign up to: "As a Mission Year Participant I will commit to... Community Living... Living Simply... Learning, Growing and Developing... Serving the local community... Building relationships..." etc. Apparently, this values statement has gone down very well with participants.

• Excitingly, Susannah expressed a real interest in partnering when we're up and running, to introduce an interfaith element to Mission Year and AVODAH.

• Thinking about where AVODAH's funding will come from, I note Mission Year was originally seed-funded by individuals, gets a number of grants from the Christian community and asks for a contribution of £750 from each participant (which doesn't even quite cover the cost of their training). Asking the churches for a contribution is also something they're looking into, making sure mechanisms are in place to help poorer churches who would have trouble affording it.

Hackney

Ever since we put together the original proposal for this programme, Hackney has been one of the front-runners as somewhere for the participants to live and work.

A couple of weeks ago I reported some advice I received regarding the social politics of Hackney - that perhaps we'd be better off steering clear, as a new Jewish player on the scene might be badly received.

I just spoke to a Hackney councillor - an old youth movement contact from RSY - who was far more positive about the possibilities.

First of all, he said the idea is very 'Big Society' (see yesterday's blog entry) and will be very popular with Cameron and co. This might bode well for possible funding from central government (endowments for community organising).

There are lots of cuts to local authority funding so we may face a real challenge getting local organisations to pay for their corps members or receiving funding direct from the council. But there are lots of potential placement organisations who would jump at the chance to receive free or low cost help. (Which still leaves the question, how do we pay for our costs? How do we raise the money needed by the participants to enable them to take part? More from private donors and foundations?)

Hackney itself, he said, is a vibrant place, attractive to potential participants.

He doubted the council could help with housing, as there's a strict points system in place and they couldn't be seen to privilege anyone.

All in all though, he said it was a great idea and - if and when it's running - he'd be keen to get involved.

Survey for potential participants

I've set up an online survey to gather the opinions of current students and potential participants. That means Jews aged 20-25 interested in social action.

The survey can be found here.

Jewish Community Organising

I've been conducting a few interviews - with students (potential participants), third sector organisations (potential placements), and one or two people involved in social action, policy and community work.

Meanwhile, Matt Plen, Movement Director of the Assembly of Masorti Synagogues, came into the JHub to give us some training in Jewish Community Organising. Essentially Matt has developed and adapted the ideas of Saul Alinsky, recently popularised through groups such as Citizens UK and concepts of the Big Society, and adapted them for Jewish community settings, using, for example, classical Jewish texts to illustrate community organising's principles.

Now, in the States, AVODAH places its corps members not only in service positions but also roles which involve community organizing. I have a meeting set up with Matthew Bolton of London Citizens, partly to explore further how AVODAH UK might fit into what they do and some of the bigger trends at work in UK society. Might it be possible for a group like London Citizens to help us place our participants in a coordinated network of community organising roles?

The Jewish Community Organising training was fascinating. It emphasised the importance of starting with individual relationships to effect change. I was also very impressed with the Jewish learning element, using the recorded actions of Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai as an example of community organising. I'm meeting Matt Plen again, to discuss how we might work together, but it seems an obvious choice to have him teach Jewish Community Organising to AVODAH UK participants as part of the programme's educational curriculum.

Feasibility advice

Results of an early interview with someone connected both politically and Jewishly:

• There would be a market for it, in terms of interested participants
• Hackney is the number one borough to avoid; moving in there and not working directly with the Haredi community would be politically complicated and confusing. Even working with the Haredi community would confuse things, given the Jewish social problems in the borough.
• Similarly basing the project in a borough with a particularly high Muslim population could complicate community relations.
• Brent would seem a more obvious choice: not without social problems, connected to Jewish centres of life, an area with a Jewish history (albeit a faded one) and greater potential to connect with the Moishe House.
• We'd be advised to speak to councillors in whichever boroughs we are thinking of at this stage.