Executive Director Sara Bamberger named Joshua Venture Group Fellow

The Joshua Venture Group, a nonprofit organization dedicated to reinvigorating and expanding the Jewish community through building the capacity of young ventures and their leadership, announced that Sara Heitler Bamberger, Executive Director of Kevah, and seven other social entrepreneurs in North America, will each receive more than $100,000 in grants and organizational development support as Fellows of its 2012-14 Dual Investment Program.

Each Fellow will receive $80,000 in unrestricted funding and over $20,000 in personalized coaching, training and networking, which equip them to realize their visions to transform the Jewish landscape. JVG’s Dual Investment Program is designed to bolster the emergence of the Jewish innovation sector, which reflects the collective desire of Jews from all backgrounds to re-envision their own Jewish communities.

Executive Director of the Joshua Venture Group, Lisa Lepson, said, “Looking at the greater Jewish landscape, it is clear that the market for new ideas is plentiful.  JVG excels at identifying the most promising of these emerging ideas, refining them and taking them to scale. We have succeeded in this endeavor, due to long-standing support from the Nathan Cummings Foundation, the Lippman Kanfer Family Foundation and the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation.”

The eJewish Philanthropy blog notes that JVG alumni have been at the forefront of their respective fields since the organization’s first cohort launched in 2001. “They have advocated for LGBT inclusion in Jewish communities, provided needed support to young Jewish women and their families battling breast cancer and worked to put the courageous efforts of Jewish partisans during WWII on the Jewish and broader education maps. The recently graduated Fellows of JVG’s 2010-2012 cohort are now working on re-imagining what it means to belong to and participate in spiritual communities, leveraging new media to breathe new life into biblical stories and texts and connecting the general causes of the economic, social and food justice movements to Jewish values, teachings and practice.”

From the JWeely: Agency awards $100K to two local nonprofit heads

This article orignially appeared in the JWeekly

Founders of two local Jewish nonprofits will receive $100,000 over the next two years from the Joshua Venture Group.

They are among eight Jewish social entrepreneurs nationwide who have been named fellows in the latest cohort of the Joshua Venture Group’s 2012 Dual Investment program. Each fellow will receive $80,000 in funding for their organizations and more than $20,000 toward personalized coaching, training and networking.

The Bay Area recipients are Sara Heitler Bamberger of the Berkeley grassroots Jewish learning program Kevah; and Elana Naftalin-Kelman, also of Berkeley, for her organization Rosh Pina, which helps Jewish institutions become special-needs certified through a one-year program.

The Dual Investment program was launched in 2001. The Joshua Ventures Group’s mission is to identify emerging leaders in the Jewish community and support their visions for social change.