Helping Jewish nonprofits blossom and broaden
OU’s Impact Accelerator Program addresses communal challenges by developing leaders
Nechama Tauber’s son Sholom accidentally was left in a hot car about a month after his third birthday.
That was almost two and a half years ago. “It’s still a shock and it’s still traumatic,” Ms. Tauber, who lives in Miami, said. “It’s still hard for me to talk about. It’s hard for me to believe that one of my children isn’t here.”
But she does talk about it because she wants to prevent it from happening again. “I feel like I want to share Sholom’s story,” she said. “People think it would never happen to them, and I want people to know it can happen.
“I think that just raising awareness is huge,” Ms. Tauber continued. “Just to talk about it, just to say that we’re human, that our brains can fail us. The same way that we can walk into our garage and not know what we came in there for, the same way we can misplace our keys and phones, we can have a split second where our minds just forget, whether it was lack of sleep or a change in schedule or a kid falling asleep or a miscommunication. There are so many ways that this can happen.”
About six months ago, Ms. Tauber co-founded Team Protect in Sholom’s memory, with the goal of raising that awareness. “There’s technology that can help,” Ms. Tauber said. “There are cars that will start blaring their horns if they detect that life is in the car and the car is off. There are low-tech devices that generate reminders when the engine is turned off, there are tips, there is so much that can be done, once there’s awareness.”
Fayna Pearlman of Dumont joined the venture early on. “There are 35 to 50 deaths of children in hot cars in the United States each year,” Ms. Pearlman said. “Usually it’s just the slightest change in routine.” When people get busy or distracted, their brains can switch to a default mode, she explained. “You kind of go on autopilot” and follow your regular routine. “Let’s say one parent usually takes the child to school, and that morning the other parent took them, the driver gets a call as they arrive, that autopilot kind of turns on and you don’t even realize it,” and the parent drops off the other kids and continues on the usual route, forgetting that the additional child is in the car.
“And there’s a lot of stigma around it,” Ms. Pearlman continued. “So often the families this happens to are some of the most loving, incredible families. We don’t realize it happens in a split second.”
In addition to raising awareness, the organization identifies and publicizes products and procedures that can help. “Most of the tools and technologies are about cracking that routine default mode network,” Ms. Pearlman said. The organization also has been raising awareness about water safety and the products available in that area.
Team Protect, which is based in Dumont and Miami, is one of eight nonprofits that recently were selected to join the Orthodox Union’s Impact Accelerator Program.
The accelerator’s mission is to address communal challenges by “advancing innovative and impactful nonprofits,” Tamar Frydman, the program’s director, said. The program, which the OU started in 2018, provides “change-makers like the people who are in our cohort with additional resources and networks to make positive impact.”
The recently selected cohort is the program’s sixth. It’s a very selective process, Ms. Frydman said. Each of these ventures is “dealing with a community challenge in an innovative and different way.”
The six- to seven-month accelerator includes three two-day summits, a series of virtual workshops, mentorship, and coaching. This year’s program began last month with the group’s first summit. The curriculum focuses on leadership, management, marketing, fundraising, and operations, which covers topics like beginner finance for nonprofits. “We try to expose them to lots of different things to help them run a nonprofit in the best way possible and to expose them to different tools and ways to improve what they’re doing and to strengthen their organization,” Ms. Frydman said.
The program also includes a type of chavruta system. “Each person in the cohort is paired with another person in the cohort to discuss some of their learning, to brainstorm around some of the challenges that might be happening, to continue to create this learning environment,” Ms. Frydman said. “It’s very important for us to build this part. We find that people trying to do a lot — like our cohort members — can be very lonely. They often stand alone when they have this idea and they want to create something and make an impact. To help them develop this network is often very helpful.”
At the end of the program, participants are eligible for a grant. They also “become part of our alumni network,” Ms. Frydman added. “We stay connected with them and we try to continue to support them in any way we can. I regularly speak to people from our past cohorts.”
Ms. Frydman is looking forward to working with the new cohort. “We are really excited and happy that we’re able to help these innovative founders make change in their communities,” she said. “We feel really proud of this program and the impact that we can make by helping all these people, who are impacting hundreds and hundreds of people out there.”
Ms. Pearlman and Ms. Tauber also are excited about the program. Ms. Pearlman sees it as an “amazing opportunity” to get help in scaling Team Protect and to gain practical tools and confidence. And she is grateful to be part of the cohort. “It was just so incredible to be in a room with nine other amazing people trying to create impact and make the world better,” she said.
Ms. Tauber found the first summit “inspiring and empowering” and sees the accelerator as part of her healing journey. “The speakers really touched me,” she said. “They really help you tap into your own inner strength. I feel very privileged to be part of it.”
Three other members of the cohort also are based in the local area: Lifnai Vilifnim in Teaneck, Shifrah: Guidance and Support for Hyperesis Gravidarum in Chestnut Ridge, New York, and Tikvaseinu in Monsey. Other participants are in Baltimore, Detroit, and Lawrence, on Long Island.
Like Team Protect, Tikvaseinu grew out of its founder’s personal experience.
After her now 7-year-old son was born, Elke Pollack suffered from a perinatal mood and anxiety disorder. It was not her first pregnancy, but “it was the first time I had experienced anything of the sort,” Ms. Pollack said. “The biggest memory that comes to mind is confusion, because people assume postpartum depression looks like one specific thing and is easily diagnosed. The reality is that PMADs encompass a lot more than just depression, and the amount of confusion around what people go through leads them to not accessing the right care and prolonging the struggle, and ultimately the road to recovery.”
After she recovered, Ms. Pollack was shocked by the limited amount of accurate knowledge available. “People assume that women don’t get help for postpartum depression because of the shame or stigma associated with it,” she said. “That’s a reality, but the bigger reality is that most women don’t know what’s going on. And not only do the women not know what’s going on, but ob/gyns, some pediatricians, if they’re not trained to monitor for it, they may not pick it up. And the reality is, one in five women experience PMADs, and 60% of those women go untreated.”
Ms. Pollack founded Tikvaseinu to provide information and support and to help women access doctors and therapists. “Ultimately, many women will need a combination of medication and therapy, so we just want to make sure that can happen in a smooth and expedited way,” she said. The organization operates a helpline, offers online support groups, and runs community awareness events and educational webinars. It also provides training sessions for first responders — rabbis, rebbetzins, doulas, lactation consultants, anyone who is likely to interact with new mothers.
Ms. Pollack launched the organization in 2022. She’s grateful for the opportunity to join the accelerator and appreciates the information, guidance, and support. And she found the first summit very helpful. “Of course fundraising is hard, but anytime I’m able to sit in a meeting with someone, it is not hard to explain the need for the organization,” she said. “It is a lot harder to do what’s called an elevator pitch — a 45-second pitch — but in two days of training I’ve gotten so much more of an understanding of how to accomplish it. What seem like small things are actually so impactful on how you represent your organization.”
As an educational program, Lifnai Vlifnim addresses a different type of communal need. The organization works with schools to “train educators to essentially work on building a culture of spirituality and religious growth and development in schools,” Yehuda Chanales, the venture’s founder, said. “The core of the program is helping teachers themselves and then helping them learn how to facilitate for students’ deeper relationships with themselves, with each other, with Torah, and with God. The underlying assumption is that if you want to build a deeper connection with Judaism, Torah, Jewish values, you first have to learn how to build a relationship with other people.”
The program is based on one designed by Makor Chaim Institutions in Israel. Rabbi Chanales, who now lives in Teaneck, was an administrator at Fuchs Mizrachi School in Cleveland a few years ago. “We as a faculty were trying to figure out how to make the Torah learning and the learning that happens in school more meaningful for students, and how to make sure that it has an impact on their development, on their identity,” he said. “We did a lot of work around curricula and pedagogy and ultimately felt like something was missing.”
The school hosted Rav Dov Zinger, Makor Chaim’s rosh yeshiva, and “we as a faculty were really taken by Rav Dov and what he was introducing to us,” Rabbi Chanales said. “We saw very quickly that this wasn’t just a tool or a curriculum, it was a language, and it was a different way with which we could interact with each other, interact with our students, and facilitate their learning.
“Often in schools we put a huge emphasis on the what, the content, the words that are being conveyed from teacher to student, from student to teacher, but we don’t pay enough attention to the space and the environment and the culture — the type of relationships that exist, the sense of trust that’s there between teachers and students, what’s going on behind the scenes for a student or a teacher when they’re walking into the classroom. Unless you pay more attention to those factors, you’re not really going to create a meaningful experience.”
Rabbi Chanales started Lifnai Vlifnim in 2021 to bring the program to North American schools. The core of the program is “lev hashavua” — translated as heart of the week — the weekly sessions that take place in school and introduce this language. The goal is to “have an impact on the language of schools and school culture,” he said.
Lifnai Vlifnim has been adding a cohort of new schools to the program every year. When next year’s group joins, the organization will be working with 25 different high schools, including a number of local ones — Maayanot in Teaneck, Naaleh in Fair Lawn, the Rae Kushner Yeshiva High School in Livingston, and SAR in Riverdale. “The schools are primarily in the United States and Canada, but we have one school in Australia, and next year a school in Mexico is joining,” Rabbi Chanales said. Most of the schools are modern Orthodox, but one nondenominational school, Bialik in Montreal, and one more yeshivish school, Ateres in Monsey, are participating. As the program expands, the goal is to “align the core approach to the needs of different kinds of schools.”
Rabbi Chanales is excited about the opportunity the accelerator provides to learn about growing an organization. “It’s an incredible resource,” he said. “The people that we’ve met so fare have a lot of insight and are people I can see myself reaching out to for help and for advice.” And he’s excited to explore those ideas with a cohort of other people who are doing similar types of things. “I know a lot about the players in the education field,” he said. “It’s nice to meet people who are doing incredible work in different mental health and social programs within the Jewish community too.”
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