Learning lessons from a year in Portland Moishe House

Before I write these blogs, I make a list, and I figure I may as well just leave it like this for organization:

Moishe House learning experience:

* Serious responsibility
* To manage responsibility, it's worth educating the community on the model and encouraging participation
* Aggressive recruiting and idea-brainstorming, it's a constant process
* Thought goes into the most advantageous strategies. Ie: recruiting aggressively vs. going too hard and weirding people out, recruiting participant involvement vs. delegating too much work for a given person's personality/responsibilities, offering free events vs. asking for monetary contributions for events

These are the main things I've taken away from my experience at Moishe House and I hope they are helpful.

First off, I've found that Moishe House is a serious responsibility. It seems a little like stating the obvious, but it's true! Moishe House events, meetings, and other commitments such as cleaning or planning, hold just as much weight as any other time commitment in my life. It's like a job, or being in school, or any serious time commitment. You can't just drop it, move it around so it's more convenient for you, etc. It's not really about you anyway, it's about serving the community, right? I've found that it's worth it for me in the long run to try really hard not to reschedule Moishe House events for any reason. I've found that it's worth it in the long run for me to weigh new time commitments that may interfere with Moishe House, and choose Moishe House. For example, this month I was going to take a week-long overnight babysitting job. Those can be quite lucrative. But it was the week of a Friday night Shabbat dinner inbetween high holidays, and I really wanted a lot of people to come. 30 people came, and I cooked for about 30 hours total...not to mention shopping and clean-up. It's really worth it to me, in addition to the overall Moishe House community and the mission behind it, to make sure I have enough time to prepare, do, and clean up after events. And I feel a sense of diligence and peace of mind about this prioritization.

It's kind of annoying that your rent status can become knowledge in the community, which is why we try not to advertise it broadly here. It becomes a joke, like you're getting off easy. While it is a great deal for someone interested in peer programming, I think the rent subsidy is a very important incentive and compensation. Grassroots activism that characterizes Jewish community-building is always full of passion, but we really do need the resources to put those passions into action. That's what Moishe House provides for us. Therefore, it's important to educate people about Moishe House. Not necessarily just for this reason, but for people who've never heard of it before, or really do want to know more. Recently someone asked me about Moishe House and I said, "It's great, I love it, it's a lot of work, but it's really rewarding. There are 4 people living in our house, we do about 8 programs per month." One time, at Yom Kippur break fast this year, I was asked. "Really? What kind of work does it involve?" I was entirely honest with him about it. "Well, we have house meetings, we coordinate our schedules of events, we manage budgets, we maintain the house, put together recruiting and big-picture goals..."

Our events for the community are in the spirit of generosity. We're building a community and we're building a home. Yet, it's important to be truthful with people in order to keep our programs sustainable. When people hear how much work we do, they really respect it and say, "Oh, wow, that's cool. Sounds fun." Sometimes even, "How can I help?" Being truthful opens the door for respect and mutual understanding. It can go on to build mutually helpful and supportive relationships. I think we can honest about ourselves and our needs and also be incredibly generous.

More notes--the recruiting and event brainstorming is a constant process. I feel like I dream about Moishe House events. I recruit people I meet at the gym for Moishe House. Because creating events every month is a constant cycle, the thinking and the connecting never stop. So it's good to be on it all the time. But I've also discovered it's important to sometimes be "off." For this one and also for the balance reasons I'll address later. For example today I was at a cafe and the boy behind me was wearing a shirt with a Jewish logo and I was feeling shleppy today, didn't do so well on my grad school homework, etc, and I just decided not to take the opportunity to recruit. I think this is important as well. To feel like you don't *always* have to be on. It can still be a top priority.

Finally, I think it's important to put a lot of thought into approaches. How many times a month do we want to email/call our audience? How should we approach this participant about a sticky situation? How can I maximize the effects of our programs without burning myself or others out? The "how" is critical. I've found it's about striking a balance. I want to invite as many people I can to events without coming off a little creepy or weird haha. I want to enlist as many people to help us with events without over-burdening others, or offering jobs to "too many cooks." I want to encourage donations to Moishe House, but not in a way that discourages people. It's one of our long-term goals we talked about tonight: we hope to take the Portland Jewish community to a place where there is more participant involvement in Moishe House events. We think it's important to have the main responsibilities in the hands of the few residents but to also encourage more of a voluntary and ownership model.