From the Desk of Adam Lehman: Key Learnings from Hillel Professionals
Friends,
Last week, we gathered at WashU in St. Louis for Hillel International’s New Professionals Institute (NPI), welcoming 208 new Hillel staff members. As I shared at the NPI opening, this convening is one of my favorite times of the year. It’s energizing and inspiring to see and feel the enthusiasm and vitality of so many new professionals as they prepare to carry forward our Hillel mission.
New Professionals Institute is also a learning opportunity for me, as I connect with the many diverse professionals who have chosen to invest their careers at Hillel. This year was no exception, and I’m sharing here four of my key learnings from the convening:
The Power of Investing in Our Talent Pipeline:
We onboarded our 10th class of Hillel Springboard Fellows, with 53 new Fellows in this year’s class. Our Springboard Fellows are high-potential early career professionals who develop and apply innovative approaches to engaging students in Jewish life on campus during a two-year fellowship — fellows like Ariel Hekier, our first-year Innovation Fellow at Tufts Hillel in Boston. Ariel is an honors graduate from Duke, who chose the Springboard Fellowship over a prestigious overseas fellowship.
While I was very impressed by the new class of Springboards, it was also gratifying to see the many former Springboard Fellows who have been promoted into new, more senior roles as campus Hillel Executive Directors, Assistant Directors, and Directors of Jewish Student Life. Sofie Ramirez Soto, the former Innovation Fellow at NYU Hillel, is a wonderful example of this progression as she takes on a new role leading Hillel’s work at Washington & Lee in Virginia as their new Jewish Life Program Director.
When we started the Springboard Fellowship, our goal was to not only infuse new energy and innovation at our campus Hillels, but also to enrich the overall pipeline of professional talent for Hillel and the broader Jewish world. This year’s New Professionals Institute was validation of the ways in which we’re advancing this critical talent pipeline objective.
Supporting the Whole Student:
We’ve also invested in growing the presence of licensed Mental Health and Wellness professionals within campus Hillels. This year, we’ll have nearly 40 social workers, therapists, and other certified and highly trained wellness professionals embedded at campus Hillels, including the nine new wellness professionals we onboarded last week.
In meeting with this cohort, I was struck by the way in which they saw their opportunity to work at Hillel as a way to apply their expertise in service of a community about which they care deeply. And we know from earlier cohorts that our mental health and wellness professionals not only provide critical support to Jewish students, but also to our other Hillel professionals as they help students navigate the unique stressors of being a Jewish student and young person on campus today.
Healing Campus Culture Through Relationship Building:
We also hosted our first-ever cohort of Campus Impact Advisors. These 13 professionals focus on both advocating for Jewish students facing bias and discrimination on campus, and strengthening relationships between Jewish student communities and other communities on campus.
While most of the professionals in this cohort have only been on campus for six months, they shared with me numerous examples of how they’ve already deepened relationships with allies on campus — through partnership with interfaith councils, inviting other faith and identity communities into Shabbats, Passover Seders, and other Jewish communal experiences — and joining those other communities for their events and celebrations.
Ensuring Sustainability for Every Hillel:
We have worked hard at Hillel International to raise the financial resources necessary to meet the growing needs of Jewish students during this unique period. In addition to supporting the increasing talent, programming, security, and advocacy needs of our current campus Hillels, we also need to invest greater resources in a new wave of schools that are attracting larger numbers of Jewish students — schools like Clemson University (South Carolina), Southern Methodist University (Texas) and James Madison University (Virginia). We’re grateful to all of you who have recognized the critical needs of supporting Jewish student life through the challenges of this period and have stretched your investments to meet these needs.
Just as our new professionals turned the page to a new chapter in their careers, we began a new book in the Torah cycle, turning the page to Devarim. In the first parsha, or chapter (also Devarim), Moses recounts to the Israelites key aspects of history and learnings from their 40-year journey from Egypt to Sinai to the banks of the Jordan, to prepare them for their entry into the Promised Land. In the same spirit, our New Professionals Institute infused key aspects of our Hillel history, values, and mission so all of our new professionals can in turn inspire all of the students we’re privileged to support and serve, along their sacred Jewish and life journeys.
Shabbat Shalom,