In 1994 I was working with the United Jewish Appeal of Toronto.  That year genocide broke out in Rwanda, which lasted 100 days and devastated the country. Estimates are that 1 million people were murdered, many macheted to death in that short three month period. I, like the rest of the world, was devastated.

I had grown up in the Jewish community. My father was a Rabbi in a small city called Kitchener and in my genes, was a passion for the Jewish people and the belief that what lied at our essence was the concept of ‘Loving thy neighbor….’, that when others are suffering we would respond to their needs.

I was the generation born into this world following the Holocaust, and grew up on the adage ‘Never Again’ – the idea that we, the Jewish people, had suffered in the world and would not allow others to go through the pain we had experienced.

So when ‘Rwanda’ happened, and the Jewish world was mostly silent I was disappointed and saddened. I approached my bosses and said we should co-ordinate a pharmaceutical drive for the Rwandan refugees who had poured into surrounding countries. To their credit, they said, “Yes, by all means.”

It was then my dream of launching Canada’s first Jewish humanitarian and relief organization – Ve’ahavta – was born.

Like romance, there is something magical about the genesis of one’s non-profit career. Those are the days when we are idealistic in a starry eyed way, and our objectives and mission statements are to the point – ‘save the world’, or ‘eradicate malaria’ or ‘stop hunger in Israel’.  Indeed those are special moments, not yet evolved into a lifestyle.

This is the first installment in a series of posts dealing with starting a non-profit and what to do once the phones have started to ring and people are asking you for the service you have always dreamed of giving.  As the founding directors of Ve’ahavta, my first piece of advice to you very cool people (who are forsaking the other Jewish dream of practicing law) is: always hold onto your memories of those romantic beginnings.

I say this, and do so with great commitment, because the day will come when you will simply not know where you’ll get the funds to cover payroll. Those days make their way into the nights! The time will come when you will be called upon to make a most difficult decision like letting go a staff member. A text message will sit in your inbox from a colleague working in the field asking you to make an ethical decision, sometimes dealing with life and death…. and you’ll stutter for a second, and then do your best to respond hoping your call, was the right one.

The tough, roll-up-your-sleeves, slug-it-out instants will become part of your daily to do list, and it is exactly in those times when you need to recall the romance, meditate on why you started your non-profit, and remember that it was for beautiful, pure reasons – with the hope and dream of enhancing the lives of others.

I am grateful for having the opportunity to launch Ve’ahavta. (I live in a country that makes a start-up NGO very possible. In Canada there are over 150,000 non-profit organizations, about half of them are operational. The non-profit sector in Israel consists of 25,000 organizations that employ over 230,000 people, quite an impressive figure).

I am also very proud of the fact that I had a dream, listened to it, and then, like you, acted on it. Writing this, looking back at those romantic days, when Ve’ahavta and I walked hand-in-hand on the quiet beaches of Canada’s social service needs, I am softened and all the tough stuff I have dealt with sort of dissipates.

Those were beautiful days. These are different, but equally as beautiful. Well done to all of you for falling in love!

Avrum Rosensweig is the founding director of Ve’ahavta: The Canadian Jewish Humanitarian & Relief Committee, based in Toronto Canada. The organization was launched in 1996 and its mission statement is to encourage all Jews and people of this earth to play an active role in Tikun Olam. Ve’ahavta has partnered up with a number of Israeli NGOs in its crisis response work including IsraAid. See www.veahavta.org

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From secretlondon123's photostream on flickr

Socially responsible investments (SRI) have gained much prominence in the last decade. Businesses and corporations are recognizing their capacity and responsibility to social wellbeing and have chosen to invest where they see a social return. Recently, a more equalized investment scenario has emerged: “creative capitalism” (as coined by Bill Gates), which merges profit generation and maximization with social issue improvement. Creative capitalism is being recognized as THE way to tackle global problems such as climate change, water, disease, terrorism, and hunger.

Yet the Jewish world is still severely under-utilizing SRIs and businesses’ involvement to address our internal needs. Nor does it utilize creative capitalism. Particularly in the current financial climate, the concepts of SRI and creative capitalism should be increasingly examined as new methods for addressing the Jewish world’s growing needs.

Global Corporate Social Responsibility

Corporate socially responsible investments on the ACTIVE level point to the fact that companies have responsibility not only to shareholders but also to stakeholders, as well as the wide array of parties interested in the companies’ actions. These include owners, investors, employees, suppliers, clients, consumers, and the general public. A company has three levels of accountability – financial, social, and environmental.

SRIs are the method by which many businesses look to improve social and environment problems that impact all stakeholders, while also being fiscally responsible. It can range from responsible production, like Nike’s commitment to achieving or exceeding baseline sustainability from the design stage through to the manufacturing stage for all its footwear, to Community Development Venture Capitalist Funds which look to invest in underprivileged areas, generating profit while raising the quality of the neighborhoods (and presumably the standard of living).

Not only has interest in SRIs increased, but so have actual investments due to a growing number of institutional investors now supporting shareholder resolutions on social, environmental, and corporate governance issues, new products, fund styles etc. In the US, for example, SRI assets have risen more than 324% from $639 billion in 1995 to $2.71 trillion in 2007. There, one out of every nine dollars invested is invested in SRIs.

In this era of SRIs playing a key role in a company’s competitive strategy, two new models have emerged which combine corporate financial goals with social ones. The first model, Corporate Social Entrepreneurship, is the transformation of socially and environmentally responsible ideas into products and services (Bill Gates’s “creative capitalism“). It was under this model that Muhammad Yunus created the concept of microcredit, which won him the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006. The second model, Global Corporate Citizenship, has a much wider global perspective. It declares that corporations have a civic duty to cooperate with governments and civil society to contribute to sustaining the world’s well being and addressing its largest issues.

SRIs and the Jewish World:

In the Jewish world, we have traditionally looked to engage philanthropy and government to address our needs. With the decline in the traditional type of philanthropy, particularly amongst younger givers, and combined with the current and foreseeable financial climate, we must engage businesses as a third partner, use new models of philanthropy, and demonstrate that businesses’ financial interests can be addressed at the same time as internal needs.

The question remains: Can the global business concept of SRIs be integrated into the Jewish world, and if so, how? This is our challenge.

Bringing a sense of corporate social responsibility into this traditionally philanthropic realm is new for the Jewish world. Government intervention has been strongly rejected (except for amongst the Orthodox) due to the strong desire to maintain separation of religion and state in the US. Involvement by the Israeli government in broader Jewish issues is obviously in play in Israel and is just starting to emerge in terms of reverse philanthropy to the US. Now, we must engage the critical inclusion of businesses -not solely Jewish businesses and/or Jewish businessmen/women – that have their own strategic interests for addressing needs facing the Jewish community (ies) and engaging them.

Jewish education has been identified as THE key to addressing the biggest issues in the Jewish world such as decreased identity, knowledge, and sense of connectedness. Yet providing universal Jewish education and day school education for those outside of Israel is expensive, sometimes prohibitively so. Providing affordable Jewish education to every Jewish youngster can only happen with the involvement of businesses, particularly those businesses that have a strategic interest in building day schools and their enrollment. Major publishers of Jewish and Hebrew textbooks and educational software, such as Milon, have a strategic financial incentive to work with the Jewish community to increase the number of pupils in day schools. Despite huge incentives, what is still missing throughout this equation is business involvement. Globally, businesses represent the newest, most innovative powers in the quest to tackle major issues, yet the Jewish world has not yet harnessed their power effectively.

In these philanthropically transformative, financially uncertain times, how do we best integrate the business element into the social equation and make them real partners in our effort to tackle the largest needs in the Jewish world?

Ahava Zarembski is Founder and President of Yesod: Strategic Consulting Group and the Yesod-Masad Initiative, providing strategic on Jewish communities in Israel and around the world. For more information contact yesodcenter@gmail.com

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