Over the past few months, a number of notable and impactful Jewish organizations have merged or shut down. Gender Equity in Hiring is closing down operations. Jumpstart shuttered after 17 years (we will be the repository for its reports). Leading Edge merged with JPro. Sometimes these shifts are geographic, like Hebrew Union College’s imminent move to the Upper West Side of NYC.
These organizational shifts got us thinking about the life cycle of Jewish organizations. What’s lost when they shutter or change? We interviewed Aliza Mazor, Chief Philanthropic Engagement Officer at UpStart, for insights from her decades launching organizations and supporting Jewish communities.
Berman Archive: Please tell us about your work and its connection to the American Jewish community.
Aliza Mazor: I have spent the past 30 + years of my career helping to support entrepreneurs and innovators in both Israel and the United States. In my early career at Shatil and the New Israel Fund, my work focused on building civil society in Israel and strengthening Israeli Society. Since 2000, my work has focused on building just, vibrant, and inclusive Jewish communities in North America. Over the decades I have worked at the intersection of leadership development, organizational development, network weaving, and field-building. The most recent chapter of my career has been at UpStart, the product of a 2017 merger of Bikkurim (where I served as Executive Director and Program Director), Joshua Venture (where I served in various roles), PresenTense North America, and UpStart Bay Area. The merger tells a great story of the evolution of a field and how needs shift over time and forms have to adapt to follow function.
BA: We’re interested in the life cycle of Jewish organizations and how efforts are preserved. Are there any examples of organizations you’ve supported that had an impact but don’t exist anymore?
AM: Many organizations came about at a particular moment to serve an important purpose and then needed to reconfigure to continue to advance that purpose. The merger that created UpStart in 2017 is one example. We needed a multiplicity of organizations working to advance innovation and entrepreneurship at a time when those ideas were met with skepticism and resistance. After a decade of “proof of concept” it was clear that we were not only launching important initiatives across the community, but we were also changing mindsets and landscapes. After a decade-plus of this work, it was clear that having lots of disparate organizations doing this work made less sense. It was distracting and confusing. We needed to consolidate to continue to grow the field. The merger that brought four organizations together as UpStart in 2017, did just that. We were able to create a pipeline of programs (using the best elements of the programs from Joshua Venture, Bikkurim, PresenTense, and UpStart Bay Area) to serve entrepreneurs at the idea, early, and growth stages. We were able to consolidate all the graduates of these historical programs into a powerful network with over 200 members. None of this would have been possible without consolidation and letting go of old forms.
BA: What’s lost if these efforts aren’t recorded or preserved?
AM: Many of the ventures that launched through UpStart and its predecessors have not survived in their original forms, but the work, the mindsets they fostered, and the ideas that they popularized live on. We need to be less focused on form and more on function. Some examples include JDub Records which popularized the idea of offering great Jewish programming in secular venues that would appeal to Jews and non-Jews alike. That ethos lives on even though JDub sunset in 2011. Jewish Farm School sunset in 2020, but the farm-based Jewish learning curricula they developed live on, and the integration of farms and gardens into Jewish settings continues. Recently, jGirls+ Magazine was acquired by Moving Traditions. This acquisition will enable this model to reach exponentially more teens and settings. Sometimes organizations function as an intervention in the system (full credit goes to Shifra Bronznick for this idea). A successful intervention sparks, action, sets direction, infuses the field with new thinking and new tools, but doesn’t last into perpetuity. The recent structured sunsets of Ta’amod and Gender Equity in Hiring Project are examples of this. In each case, the leadership ensured that the work persists even if the organization no longer exists.
Recording and preserving these efforts is critical to this process. Change is iterative. The work of one group of leaders can only build off the work of another if a record is available. The idea behind a structured sunset is that you have a plan and resources to document the work and disseminate what was learned. In an acquisition or merger, that becomes the role of the acquirer or merged entity.
BA: From your experience, are there large trends in the ebb and flow of Jewish organizational life that you’ve noticed?
AM: Consolidation is a natural consequence of generativity. The Jewish community needs to generate new ideas to adapt to emerging needs and a changing environment and we need tools and resources to consolidate or close when that makes sense. Not every good idea needs to be a stand-alone organization. There is unnecessary anxiety around mergers, acquisitions, and sunsets. They are seen as a sign of failure. We need more permission to test things and change direction. Ideally, every organization asks itself at regular intervals if it still needs to exist as a stand-alone organization if its mission could be better served in collaboration with another entity, or even if it has fulfilled its purpose and it is time to sunset.
BA: How do you see the relationship between fledgling orgs and legacy orgs in the Jewish community?
AM: There should be more productive collaboration among established organizations and fledging ventures. Established organizations have platforms that can offer newer ventures wider channels of distribution. One of the challenges faced by newer ventures is that they are well-kept secrets and only a small number of participants benefit from what they have to offer. Sometimes there is a perception of competition between new and established organizations or a perception that the new ideas are an implicit critique of what came before it. We forget that we are on the same team in creating a vibrant Jewish community with many points of access.
Aliza Mazor advances UpStart and the UpStarter Network by building deep, collaborative philanthropic and institutional partnerships. Additionally, Aliza spearheads business development for UpStart Solutions and UpStart Labs, two new initiatives that help funders and institutions provide stage-based capacity-building to their grantees and constituents. Throughout the past three decades, Aliza has worked at the intersection of leadership development, organizational development, network weaving, and field-building. She has served as an executive director and an independent consultant to philanthropies, capacity-builders, and social justice organizations. A Chicago native, Aliza spent fifteen years living and working in Israel.
