WJC NextGen: Engaging Jewish youth to face tomorrow’s challenges

The WJC made the strategic decision in August 2019 to consolidate its various projects for college and university students, to create WJC on Campus, an umbrella unit encompassing the Ronald S. Lauder Fellowship, the WJC Campus Pitch Competition, and Start-Up Nation Mentorship. After 18 months of dynamic growth and activity in this field, the WJC will carry on with these successful projects as elements of an expanded young leadership program, WJC NextGen, with members aged 16-26.

Established in 2019, the Ronald S. Lauder Fellowship is a highly selective project providing extensive training and WJC network access to a select group of students who have demonstrated their commitment to engaging in meaningful change at their places of study, as well as within their own communities. The WJC Campus Pitch Competition, launched in New York 2015, has expanded to become a global competition that encourages and enables students to submit ideas for innovative initiatives to change the discourse about Israel and Jewish affairs at universities worldwide. In 2020 and 2021, the WJC received applications from students in dozens of countries for project ideas including interfaith collaborations, dialogue forums, on-campus Israel education exhibits, and more. In April 2021, the WJC and World Union of Jewish Students (WUJS) buoyed the Campus Pitch Competition to launch NextGen Inc., an incubator of ideas aimed at providing Jewish students with the resources necessary to continuously build these ideas into strong and sustainable projects. NextGen Inc. will operate as a project led by WJC NextGen. The Start-Up Nation Mentorship, a project born in 2018 as part of the WJC’s Campus Pitch Competition, has since grown into a comprehensive project pairing hundreds of students from across six continents with Israeli industry leaders and executives, providing them with unique personal insight and an updated perspective on the Jewish state. More than 150 mentors – including CEOs, start-up founders, journalists, and more – hailing from a wide-range of companies and entities have taken part in the program, providing guidance to students through an Israeli lens, unrelated to politics.

WJC NextGen will operate with the objective of providing its members with the tools necessary to eventually progress to join the WJC Jewish Diplomatic Corps and undertake long-term contributions as well as leadership roles within Jewish communities and organizations. These individuals will hone their skills to make a meaningful impact today, as they prepare to become the future Jewish leaders of tomorrow.

Top: Adam Shapiro, former WJC Ronald S. Lauder Fellow and President & Founder of Start-Up Nation Mentorship, speaking at Cornell University

Right: The 2019-2020 cohort of Ronald S. Lauder Fellows meet with WJC President Lauder in New York, August 2019

Conference co-organized by the Israel Council on Foreign Relations (ICFR) and SIGNAL on Sino–Israeli relations, 2019 Credit: Gilad Kavalerchik