the Tikkun Olam Dilemma
juggling social and environmental agendas >> jonathon feinberg
becomes more difficult. Eliana Golding works with the Urban Defense Project (UDP), which works for both social and environmental improvements in the Detroit-Shoreway neighborhood of Cleveland. It ponders questions such as whether an organization focused on changing environmental habits within the Jewish community could benefit
Sybil Sanchez, executive director of the Coalition on the Environment and Jewish Life (COEJL), shared, “[COEJL’s] biggest challenge—which I think many kinds of groups encounter—is funding and bandwidth. The best collaborations happen naturally, because it’s hard to start a new partnership if the issue or project is not somehow already on your agenda.” COEJL engages in campaigns aimed at “Protecting Creation from Generation to Generation,” including greening synagogues around the U.S. and the Jewish Energy Covenant Campaign (www. coejl.org/covenant). Competition was also listed as the top hurdle by Carmi Wisemon, executive director of Sviva Israel, which develops and implements environmental education programs for youths around the world using class-based, online, and social networking platforms. “There is a great deal of protectionism among groups generally. Small funding pools and similar program ideas lead to conflict. Personalities also clash; some people are just bad at collaborating,” Wisemon said. Sanchez agreed with this notion of organizational and personal conflict. “[You] need to make sure you are not competing for the limelight and that you are sharing work fairly,” she said. There is also a deeper, more Jewish community-specific impediment to
from partnering with UDP, a group that works on the needs of a specific neighborhood. “Partnering and collaborating can be difficult because each organization has its own goals and missions,” Golding said. While differences in goals can prevent collaboration between organizations, one of the primary impediments to any kind of collaboration is available funding. Many groups want to work together, but barely have the funding necessary to achieve their own programmatic goals. Furthermore, the Jewish philanthropic world has largely had an anthropocentric focus, working on taking care of the immediate needs of the community instead of its longer-term sustainability.
collaboration. The Jewish community has tended to finance more welfare-based programs within the community, but this limits our abilities to create change and leads to even more specialization. Wisemon calls this the Tikkun Olam Dilemma. “At what point do we expand past the immediate needs of our community to the broader issues we find important as citizens of the world?” he said. We want to do more than provide for basic community needs, but how do we do this when we still have starving, homeless, and disadvantaged Jews around the world? Despite all of the impediments, at their roots, social and environmental groups both work for a better world that can sustain the
COEJL, Hazon, 350.org volunteers at the global day of action on climate change, 10/10/10. Photo by Kevin Tunney.
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erving on a committee to develop a community garden for an underserved population in Woodland, CA, I experienced firsthand the challenges of collaboration between groups with different interests. Causes motivating the various groups included such diverse interests as development in the Latino community, spreading awareness of organic farming, creating more green space, and simply spreading awareness of their organization. Calculate the differences in these vantage points, and the result is a great deal of conflict and complicated internal politics. One particular divide that can be challenging to bridge is that between groups focused on social action and those on environmental causes. “The impediments are somewhat abstract; for example, loggers struggling for wages and basic needs will conflict with environmentalists struggling to end deforestation,” said Catherine Bell, program director of the Jewish Organizing Initiative (JOI), which provides its fellows with training and mentorship in community organizing and places them in various social and environmental groups. As organizations’ focuses become increasingly specialized, working with specific communities or ecosystems or only engaging in certain kinds of programming, collaboration
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issue twelve 2010
“In real grassroots work, people listen to what folks care about and tensions fall away. A healthy environment is necessary for human justice.”
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