Moishe House Philadelphia has slowly been making its way to becoming a premiere Jewish organization in the city. Over the past few years we have been cementing our place in the young adult community of our friends, and connecting with those people who are slightly outside of our initial networks. This has been a wonderful exercise of word-of-mouth and talking to those people you think might be interested, while not scaring them off with too many things at once.
Looking forward, we have started building our connections with other Jewish organizations, and not just the ones focused on the young adult population. From this idea, we think the general vision for our Moishe House is to become a "hub of connections" for Jewish young adult life in Philly. We use this term in particular because it is not just that we are a place to come and hang out with your friends; we feel MHP is a place to make new friends, new business partners, new contacts, etc.
Over the next year we definitely see ourselves reaching out into the larger Jewish community to forge bonds that can be useful for this purpose. Our first major bond of this nature was in the form of our Sukkot Walking tour on October 4th, a joint venture with the Center City Kehilah. We have had some discussions with them about joining the Kehilah and what that would mean for our future. In addition, there is some discussion about partnering with the local Reconstructionist Congregation in West Philly, Kol Tzedek, on a Mitzvah project in November. These bonds, while definitely sharing our branding with everyone, will cement our role as young adult liaisons in the general community.
Over the next 3 to 5 years, it is hard to tell where we will be, or even if the same set of residents will be in the same house. What we do hope for is that we can extend our reach to more places around the city via events like "Shabbat on the Road," the next iteration of which is happening in West Philly on October 9th. By connecting with other populations outside of Center City, we hope to increase our constituency base. With the bonds we are forming with other organizations, this is bound to happen as well.
Moishe House Philadelphia is a thriving hub of Jewish young adult activity and will definitely be for years to come. The only thing we need to do now is sip espresso with others in the community while talking up our business :)
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