House Blog: MH Boston's Goals and Vision

Moishe House Boston has spent a good deal of time hammering out our goals and mission. For starters, I will share them:

Mission: Moishe House Boston: Kavod Jewish Social Justice House is an innovative grassroots organization, striving to create a welcoming and vibrant Jewish community for people in their 20s and 30s, and to connect them with social action and community-building opportunities in Boston and beyond.

Goals of Moishe/Kavod House

1. Create an inclusive community of young Jews and activists through Shabbat dinners, social action, Jewish learning, and the arts.

2. Connect the Jewish community with social action and ‘world repair’ tikkun olam work.

3. Train and develop young Jewish leaders to build community, organize social action work, and run Jewish programming.

These goals and mission are pretty high level, so how do we achieve them in the short- and mid-term? Well, we recently elected a community board, whose role is to create short- and long-term goals and to make sure that our programming serves our mission/goals. The housemates serve on the board, but we are in the minority, so that the community itself is empowered to set our direction.

Given this, I can’t exactly say what our 1, 3, and 5 year goals are, because that is a process that the board is about to begin. I can say that in general we are moving towards a model where housemates serve as weavers and organizers, and community members serve not only as participants but also as organizers and leaders themselves. We are also thinking about “building power” in the wider Boston Jewish community, so that when people at the federation think of either “young Jews” or “social justice,” they think of us, and think to include us in the conversation. In that way, even as we continue to engage Jews “on the fringe,” we hope both to become part of the mainstream Jewish conversation, and help shift it towards our values of youth empowerment, leadership development, and social justice orientation.

I can also give my personal opinion on our goals, though again, this is just my opinion, and it is the community board who will decide.

In my view, our goal in one year is to have a functioning board that sets goals and strategy for the community, and helps us raise the funds we need to cover our ever expanding community’s needs. I also hope that we will put in place stronger membership, communications, and finance structures that will make our community more transparent, easy to enter, and easy to manage.

In three years, I think our challenge will be to be sustainable without the leadership of our original members and founders, since at least I will be graduating from rabbinical school and possibly leaving Boston. Or, if the original leaders choose to stay involved, our challenge will be to find new roles for them and others that allow for new people to take leadership and ownership of the community while supporting our wider growth. On a social justice front, we hope to be able to run a major campaign that makes a difference on some issue, where we engage all the parts of our community – learning Jewishly about the issue, doing art related to the issue (e.g. posters and murals), connect the issue to Jewish practice, and work with other social justice groups to make an impact. We are trying that out this year, but I hope that in three years we can do it in an even bigger way. I also hope that in three years our membership, finance, development, and communications structures will not only be in place but will be growing in effectiveness and community-participation.

Our five year plan has some big question-marks. There is widespread debate in our community about whether we want to stay as a 20s-only organization or “age-up,” continuing to include our members now even if they are “too old” to be part of Moishe House. Many of our older members want to stay involved, even if it means finding non-Moishe funding to support our programs for people in their 30s. So, I think we will have to have some hard conversations about our direction, both on the board level, the community level, and the funding level. Whatever happens on that front, in five years I hope that we have a clear process of goal-setting and tracking, that we are engaging even more people in the wider Boston Jewish community, and that we are more successfully integrating the different aspects of our work. I also hope that we not only continue to engage and develop young leaders, but that we also create a replicable process to do so, so that our leaders can teach new people how to lead, and so that our model can help other Moishe Houses and other Jewish organizations to outreach and organizing in a more effective and empowering way.

May we all be blessed this year with clarity of vision and strength to carry it out. Shanah tovah!