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.

Funding

I have always been aware one of the most difficult tasks in this feasibility study will be coming up with a model of funding to support and sustain our new organisation. As I've already mentioned, in the very best case scenario, we'll still be operating on a much smaller budget than our American cousins, who have a full office of staff and four houses in four different cities.

Two days ago I met with Rashid Iqbal of The Children's Society, who advised me on a number of funding-related issues, drawing on his organisation's own experience.

• We're taking an organisational concept from the US but funding markets and therefore models are different. We'll have to explore what translates and what doesn't.
• Sustainability and scalability are often used as benchmarks for projects, but the key is to find a funding model which is adaptable enough to allow the organisation to maintain its essential mission while bringing in enough money as existing grants expire and need replacing.
• We need to be able to articulate our core mission in different - but honest - ways, so as to appeal to funders and their priorities. For example, AVODAH USA seem to put a large emphasis on the impact of their program on the individual participant, but many donors, particularly in the wider (i.e. non-Jewish) social action sector may well be resistant to investing in individuals rather than directly in social issues. In the case of Jewish funding organisations, the impact on the participant and their lifelong commitment to social action in a Jewish framework may attract strong interest, but it will be important we can also emphasise the direct impact on poverty when necessary.
• Articulating the programme's impact on social issues and poverty might be challenging. How will be able to evaluate and quantify this, when effectively we are providing existing projects and organisations with a worker for a year? If the placement organisations pay something (but not as much as a full worker's salary) for their AVODAH corps members, would they have hired someone else had the placement partnership not taken place? (We certainly wouldn't want incumbent staff to feel we're about to take their jobs.)
• To help us fundraise, we'll need to design our evaluation systems so they return quick results as well as long-term indicators (e.g. one year in plus). Presumably we'll be fund-raising for the next annual cycle just a couple of months into the first cohort's year. It will be important to point at evidence that the programme is starting to achieve what we claim it will.
• The 'Big Society', including initiatives like London Citizens, is big news at the moment, and our funding efforts may well be aided if we can frame our work in terms of community organising and the benefits to the wider society. The connections are there and I'll be meeting with representatives of London Citizens in the next few weeks.
• It may also help to ring-fence funding. For example, some funders might be willing to fund evaluation but not the project itself.
• We also might fundraise to give each participant a personal social action seed-fund, to invest directly in a social action cause or project around their placement, thereby generating more evidencible impact.
• AVODAH US have been going for 12 years, building up and investing in a strong alumni network, especially through the Pursue program. While we'll necessarily concentrate on existing corps members at first, we'll want to harness our alumni network as we move forward. Should we be instilling a sense of responsibility not only to social justice in general but also to the AVODAH programme that provided them with the experience?
• The Charity Commission has said government spending cuts will hit charities hard, costing them billions of pounds. Will potential placements and funders be reluctant to invest in our programme by the time we come round to setting it up? This feasibility study must involve a fair amount of risk assessment around the political and economic climate and the organisation's contextual environment.

Education

One central element of AVODAH: The Jewish Service Corps is its education component, its learning curriculum Corps Members get to experience throughout their year. According to their website:

You will gather weekly to learn with other Corps members, and attend weekend retreats throughout the year. During these sessions, you will meet with a wide variety of top-level activists, trainers and educators to learn more about the dynamics of urban poverty. You will also learn how to become an effective agent for social change, and the way that Jewish history, culture and religion connect to your work to combat poverty and strengthen community.

In our project proposal, Andrew and I stated the education element would comprise 15-20% of the programme's overall emphasis (I guess this could equivalent to how a typical participant shares out his or her time on the programme) and would include:

• Jewish learning and Torah;
• Skills training; and
• Leadership and personal development

Questions for us are:

• Who will design or manage the educational curriculum?
• Will it run evenings (as with AVODAH in the USA, who have say four educational evenings per month) or daytimes, say one day a week? If the latter, will we be able to ask for the same amount of investment from our placement organisations?
• Who will teach? There is no lack of educators and speakers from social action organisations (Jewish and otherwise) in the UK.
• How much peer education do we ask for and encourage? AVODAH USA Corps Members visit the work-place of one participant per month, where they also take part in an educational session written and delivered by that participant.
• Are we hoping for any significant improvement over the course of the year in the participants' Jewish literacy? Rabbi Ruskay, National Education Director, firmly states this is not the goal of AVODAH, that the program can simply show Corps Members how Judaism and social justice intersect, while there are other options if your primary goal is to become a more literate Jewish learner.
• What would we identify as the key skills for AVODAH UK participants to learn, as regards their social work, for use on the programme but also equipping them for a future life of social action? AVODAH USA have chosen to cover fund-raising (before the programme begins actually, so they can raise something to go towards their year), public speaking, philanthropy, and mapping the Jewish community ('Who is speaking in my name?').
• Can we outsource some of the education element? AVODAH USA are building a database of curricula and lesson plans. The organization is used to asking, what is the social action component of the next Jewish festival? I know Tzedek, for one, have a good deal of materials on social justice and the Jewish calendar.

Stakeholders

Who are the stakeholders I need to be speaking to about this new organisation? With thanks to Marilyn Sneiderman, Executive Director of AVODAH in the US, I'd guess the list looks something like this:

• participants
• other Jewish social justice organisations
• placement organisations
• staff
• donors
• board members
• advisory councils
• city/neighbourhood officials
• the broader social justice sector/community
• socially progressive Jews

Partnerships, Moishe House, scalability and reach

Interestingly - certainly from my point of view as founder-resident of Moishe House London - there are lots of anecdotal links between AVODAH and various Moishe Houses across the USA. Conceptually this makes a lot of sense. Both programs provide Jews in their 20s with an opportunity to form a community in a house together and reach out to affect other people. A number of AVODAH Corps Members, having tasted vibrant Jewish community, have graduated and moved into Moishe Houses to help create Jewish community for their friends and peers.

There are of course some important differences between the two programs. AVODAH is more of a program in a traditional sense, lasting one year, with mandatory learning and activities (two nights per week, most weeks). Corps Members have some say in programming, in dialogue with their program manager, but not nearly as much autonomy as Moishe House residents in designing the shape and content of their community. And they obviously exist for different purposes. Moishe House is first and foremost about creating Jewish community, and reaching out to other Jews. AVODAH is, I think, about the intersection of social change and Jewish life - providing participants with a chance to explore "justice issues in a Jewish framework" (Rabbi Stephanie Ruskay, AVODAH Education Director) - and an intense experience working with social poverty.

One of the most attractive aspects of Moishe House to potential funders is its enormous reach and, therefore, value for money. One house of say four residents reaches hundreds if not thousands of young Jews per year. The work performed by the placement organizations served by AVODAH Corps Members may touch the lives of thousands of clients, but it is not possible to say AVODAH creates this reach. Rather AVODAH provides each placement organization with one staff member.

In the staff brainstorming session I attended at the AVODAH offices we spoke about innovative potential partnerships between AVODAH and other Jewish organizations, such as Hillel and Moishe House. To what extent could AVODAH benefit from a partnership with Moishe House, forming, let's say, a hybrid Moishe-AVODAH House by which participants work for social justice organizations during the day and create outward-looking Jewish community at home? How much further might AVODAH's message of social justice in a Jewish framework spread, serving as an inspiration to all who visit the house?

I'm asking these questions not to challenge AVODAH's staff in America - they are already deeply involved in thinking about a wide range of possible future directions - but rather to consider the extent of the parameters of our proposed organisation and programme. We probably need to identify the core of AVODAH UK's operations before breaking out into innovative partnerships and hybrid programmes. Nevertheless, could AVODAH UK's core focus incorporate some of Moishe House's best elements? To what extent could our corps members create events for others in their house, as a major part of the programme? How much time and energy would they have to do so?

AVODAH houses in the USA are always a short distance from existing centers of Jewish community, so Corps Members can experience Jewish life relatively easily. If we, as AVODAH UK, established our first house in say Hackney residents would be close to the communities in Stamford Hill, but these are mostly ultra-Orthodox... One of the house's tasks might be to bring more Jewish community to the area, to revive a vibrant sense of Jewish community in places it used to thrive. This might require more facilitation and help from a central coordinator and educators, depending on the Jewish experience and skill-set in the group. And these questions tie in strongly with the local/city-wide focus issue raised below (8th bullet-point, 'Placements', 21 September).

In starting a new organisation we have the luxury of a blank canvas, the opportunity to take elements from a wide range of organisations and programmes, to tweak our own programme's focus to perfectly suit societal and communal needs, participant and placement demand, and the funding landscape. I am now reaching the stage in my feasibility study where I will be meeting representatives from relevant organisations across London and the UK - bringing further opportunities to consider just what AVODAH UK might do.

Terminology

I was privy, at the AVODAH annual staff retreat, to an interesting discussion on terminology, which taps into questions about AVODAH's purpose.

We talked about three terms often used to describe what AVODAH do:

1. Social justice

2. Service

3. Social change

We didn't come to any decisive conclusions but it was suggested that:

• 'Social justice' refers to attempts to address oppression
• 'Service' might not be the same as 'services,' which generally refer to direct and specific attempts to alleviate the symptoms of oppression and/or poverty
• 'Social change' could of course be positive or negative. We generally use it to refer to positive attempts to address the root causes of poverty and/or oppression

'Tikkun Olam' is a term I didn't hear used to describe what AVODAH does. Sarra Alpert suggested this is possibly because it has lost meaning through over-use in the Jewish community. I would also imagine it is a less useful (overly exclusive) term for a programme dealing with non-Jewish partner organisations in addition to Jewish communities.

It is worth thinking about what kind of terminology a UK version of AVODAH would use. 'Social action' is commonly used and reasonably well-understood in this country, 'service' probably less so.

Placements

One of the main areas we'll need to explore is placements i.e. the social justice, service and anti-poverty NGOs in which the participants would work for the duration of the programme. Any new AVODAH-like project would have to make the contacts in these potential placement organisations and convince a sufficient number that an AVODAH UK participant would bring valuable acquisition. How are those contacts made and partnerships made? What skills would they require from their AVODAH UK participants? How much would they be willing to pay for a Corps Member?

I plan to meet potential placements over the course of the feasibility study, but AVODAH in the US provides a number of pointers and issues for consideration:

• AVODAH placement types are currently a mix between 'service' (i.e. direct, face to face work with clients in need) and 'community organizing' (i.e. helping people advocate for themselves e.g. bringing tenants together). How specific would we want our organisation's focus to be? Is it 'anti-poverty' or 'anti-oppression' in general? And what is the culture of service and community organising in this country? Where do developments such as London Citizens fit in?

• AVODAH currently require that a Corps Member's work is at least 50% working with clients, as opposed to administrative work.

• Andrew and I have wondered how we might manage to create sufficient placement demand for an AVODAH UK Corps Member if participants lack specialist skills to bring to the organisation. But AVODAH USA have few problems placing Corps Members in positions that require quick training and no specific experience or qualifications. Corps Members often create their own projects and tend to work in 'intake' and 'screening' roles e.g. paralegals or receiving first contact from clients. Sometimes language skills or teaching ability are useful, but schools in particular tend to expect people with less experience.

• All of AVODAH's placements are listed here. Examples include housing action centers and homebuilders, school children's student empowerment organizations, mediation centers, specialized health services, homeless counseling services and program assistants in domestic violence sanctuaries. While these are useful examples of the type of work carried out by Corps Members, the exact nature of the organisations a UK programme would work with will depend on local or city-wide needs, demand and the NGO culture.

• In the USA, placements apply (by form) for an AVODAH Corps Member and demand generally outstrips supply. Most of the placement organizations working with the NYC program have partnered with AVODAH for at least 10 years. AVODAH Corps Members have a good reputation that comes with the program, and - while AVODAH certainly doesn't want to put not-for-profit workers out of a job, placements know they can get a good worker for relatively little money.

• A new AVODAH organisation in the UK will have to build up relationships with placements from scratch. A good place to start will be to follow up personal contacts in potentially suitable NGOs. It will also be worth approaching organisations who already use interns and participants from programmes such as City Year, as they will likely know how to make best use of Corps Members - in America AVODAH Corps Members often work alongside participants from programs such as Americorps. We would have to put to NGOs the question: if we could provide you with a capable but non-specialised person at such and such price, would that work for you?

• AVODAH have consciously chosen to work with a wide variety of organizations in a wide variety of fields. The program addresses a range of issues and, with monthly site visits to each other's workplaces, offers Corps Members a chance to learn about a number of different approaches to and methods in social justice work and service.

• This raises the issue of breadth versus depth. An option that AVODAH in the USA has chosen not to pursue so far is to focus and entire Corps' placements around one issue or in one deprived geographical area, which could enable the group to make a more tangible impact. The project proposal that Andrew and I submitted to the JHub suggested we would base the participants' work in and around one London borough, in which the house would be based too. Additional advantages could include higher visibility and positive community relations within the area, increased cooperation between participants/placements and the possibility of an AVODAH multi-agency approach, lower transport costs and greater programme manageability. It might also help participants enhance the sense of Jewish community in their area. The BINA BaShchuna programme which runs in South Tel Aviv provides a very useful model for locally focused communal living, Jewish learning and social action.

• If we do recommend a local focus, to what extent should we institute official programme elements ensuring participant interaction with their neighbourhood organisations and communities, outside of work placements? In AVODAH's smaller city programs, such as Washington DC and New Orleans, this kind of interaction has sometimes developed organically, by itself.

• As much as possible, the relationship between placements and their AVODAH Corps Members is unmediated and treated as a normal job. While the placement match-up process results in AVODAH's specialized 'three-way contract' - an agreement between AVODAH, the Corps Member and the placement - AVODAH will only step into a work situation if a situation has deteriorated seriously or irretrievably i.e. if that contract has been breached in some way. I imagine this increases the sense of professionalism for the placement and the Corps Member, prevents messy over-complication, and maximises participant learning on the job.

• Any concerns about attracting a sufficient number of placements notwithstanding, we will have to consider our criteria for choosing organisations to partner with. AVODAH USA prefer NGOs with a strong concept of long-term change (often with a legislation team) rather than simply alleviating symptoms of poverty, who can clearly make good use of a Corps Member, and who are small enough to feel personal and include the participant in a sense of camaraderie.

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.

Feasibility study and blog

From September to December 2010 my task is to research and write a feasibility study for the Pears Foundation, exploring the possibility of setting up a new Jewish communal living and social action project in London, based largely on AVODAH Jewish Service Corps, which has been running in the United States since 1998.

I will be using this blog to record my progress and capture thoughts and issues as they come up. I don't expect anyone else to read this, except maybe Steve Miller, my mentor on the project, but do hope it will be a useful resource towards writing the feasibility study, more ordered and thought through than a set of personal notes or even a journal, but less structured and formal than the final paper itself. I intend to update the blog each time I discover something new, have an important or interesting meeting around the project, or need to think my way round a problem or set of issues.

I anticipate the feasibility study will cover three main areas: mapping existing projects and organisations similar or related to the one I and my colleague Andrew Munk are proposing to establish, describing what else is out there in the Jewish and non-Jewish world, both in the UK and abroad; scoping the potential for our new organisation, identifying the main issues, financial, operational or otherwise; and setting out a blueprint for action, making specific proposals and recommendations to the Pears Foundation and JHub, who are sponsoring this study.