NETWORKING & LEARNING SERIES

EXPANDING YOUR REACH

Expanding Your Reach is a networking and learning series for youth professionals to fuel your engagement work and connect to one another.  Join colleagues both familiar and new for free workshops and expert-led sessions.  All topics drawn from best practices from the teen initiatives in 10 communities and years of research in the field.

Introducing two NEW opportunities for youth professionals to fuel your engagement work and expand your reach.

MASTER CLASS SERIES

Become a Master Youth Professional by joining these multi-session deep dives into exciting topics designed to expand your skills and transform your work.  Of course you’ll build important relationships with colleagues along the way.

FALL 2021

EYR Masterclass in Teen Wellness

Registration is now OPEN. Sign up now to reserve your seat and get more information.

SPRING 2021

EYR Masterclass in Expanding Impact

Sign up now to be added to our communications list and be notified when registration opens for this session.

COMING SOON! – NETWORKING CLUB
This self-directed, high-tech opportunity empowers youth professionals to expand and deepen their professional network.  With the assistance of technology, the networking club acts like a super-connector, facilitating casual conversation that leads to not-so-casual professional impact.  Participants will be paired based on personal and professional interests, with colleagues from across our field to grow your work, share your wisdom, spark creative partnerships and more.

Sample Session Topics:

Collaboration & Recruitment
Outcome-Based Program Design
Impact Evaluation
Grant Writing & Fundraising
Storytelling With Data

Past Webinars

10:00am – 11:30am PDT / 1:00pm – 2:30pm EDT

This month’s session is Network-Building: Relationships and connections are critical to both success and satisfaction.  While some people network simply to add contacts to a list, there are deeper ways to build true connections.  Connecting is about sharing knowledge, resources, time, energy and empathy, creating tremendous value. We are kicking off our year-long series on networking and learning with a focus on networking.  As we build our careers, especially during times of uncertainty and challenge, we all would benefit form a strong network of advisors, mentors, and trusted colleagues. This workshop will help position you to take advantage of this new, national professional development network and introduce you to colleagues around the country. In addition to actionable advice on how you can harness the power of relationships (especially in a virtual world) and build your network long before you need it, we will also discuss how and why these skills are helpful for teens and brainstorm the best way to translate this knowledge to the population we work with.

Guest Expert: Krista Parkinson is a former talent agent and founder of My Grads Get Jobs, a company designed to help students and recent grads get their first jobs in the entertainment business. Since 2015, she developed and taught a method to help young adults get hired resulting in over 700 people being hired in jobs and internships at talent agencies, production companies, studios, TV shows and films. Over the past 20 years, Krista has worked at WME (agent in the reality TV dept), Tony Hawk’s 900 Films (VP of development), entertainment finance company Content Partners (SVP of business development and marketing) and as an adjunct professor at USC. Building and maintaining your professional network is the key to success and is a cornerstone of her success. She teaches with passion, authority and enthusiasm.

This month’s session is Community-Building Online: This experiential (and fun!) workshop is designed to model creative techniques for virtual engagement, facilitation, and community-building. Teen educators will participate in a highly interactive and creative program that weaves community and connection into an educational setting. From Zice Breakers to virtual experience design, this workshop will offer fresh inspiration to keep online programming strong, and learn best practices firsthand for sparking culture, building connection, and ways to design buzzworthy experiences for teens that transcends the screen. Guest Experts: Trybal Gatherings – As featured by The New York Times, Trybal is the leading provider of Jewish summer camp experiences for young adults nationally. In the virtual world, Trybal is the preeminent thought-leader in designing high-impact experiences online. Trybal has produced creative virtual programs, interactive trainings, and dynamic retreats that have served over 250 organizations worldwide.

   

This month’s session focuses on Outcome Based Program Design led by guest expert, Dr. Evie Rotstein. Evie is the Senior Education Advisor School of Education at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion. She was previously the director of the Leadership Institute for Congregational Educators, the professional learning project co- sponsored by the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS) and HUC-JIR. Prior to that position she was a congregational school educator and developed programs for faculty learning, teen mentoring and parent education. Evie has also served as an educational consultant for Experiment in Congregational Education, the Jewish Education Project and Beit T’shuvah. She is currently doing research on Social and Emotional Learning in Jewish settings. Evie began her career in Jewish education as a camp director for Young Judaea. She holds an M.A. in French Language education and a Doctorate in Jewish education from The Jewish Theological Seminary.  Evie’s research interests include interfaith families, adolescent identity development, professional learning and mentoring. She teaches courses in the New York School of Education at Hebrew Union College –Jewish Institute. Evie has published chapters in What We Now Know About Jewish Education (2006), in The Gender Gap (2008), and in the International Handbook of Jewish Education (2011). She also has a certificate from the Harvard John Kennedy School of Government and the Center for Creative Leadership. During her leisure time, Evie enjoys her organic garden, Broadway shows, listening to Irish music and hiking.

This month’s session focuses on Impact Assessment with Shira Rosenblatt:  “Measure what you value, and others will value what you measure.”  As youth professionals, we often feel intuitively when we’ve created and executed a powerful experience for our young learners.  But how can we know if we’ve really hit the mark?  And how can we share the analysis of our excellence easily with our stakeholders?  Join Shira Rosenblatt, Associate Chief Program Officer and evaluation guru from the Los Angeles Jewish Federation as she leads us in networking around the concept of program assessment.  Shira will share some of the reasons why evaluation is so important as well as important differences between forms of assessment that you can easily and immediately employ in your work.  Come prepared with a recent program or experience for which you might wish to gain more insight into the successes and growth points.  

This month’s session focuses on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion with Gamal Palmer from the Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles. Gamal will be addressing leadership and diversity as well as how to assess and transform the culture around Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in our professional settings and with those we serve.
Bio:
Gamal Palmer is the Senior Vice President of Leadership Development at the Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles, overseeing several leadership programs and board and professional development for a 170-person staff. Palmer is also the Founder and CEO of Global Eye Entrepreneurs, a multicultural network for male entrepreneurs of color. Palmer designed and lectured the international programs at Yale University, Theater and Public Health in Swaziland and South Africa and Social Justice in Tanzania. Palmer earned his Post-Graduate Associate from Yale School of Management, M.FA. from Yale School of Drama and a B.A. from University of Miami. Palmer served as a Los Angeles Global Justice Fellow and delivered a TEDx Talk on the intersection of art and social impact. In 2018, Palmer was an International Career Advancement (ICAP Fellow) at the Aspen Institute. A native of Philadelphia, Palmer is the youngest of nine children and was highly influenced by his activist parentage.

Moving the Needle on Teen Recruitment, Retention and Engagement, led by Adam Smith, Brett Lubarsky and Leah Finkelman with special guest Rabbi Allie Fischman.
How do we move the needle? Join Adam Smith and Brett Lubarsky from Combined Jewish Philanthropies, Greater Boston’s Jewish Federation – Boston in an exploration of strategic approaches to discovering and defining what success in the teen education and engagement space can look like for our communities, and how Boston is implementing steps to create a shared language, system of metrics and connected strategy. Let’s take some time to think about the questions you and your organization can ask, which approaches you can take and what you really mean when you say you want to “move the needle” on teen recruitment, retention and engagement.

This month’s session focuses on Social Media and Teen Empowerment. Over 85% of Gen Z reports that social media is the primary vehicle by which they discover new products and opportunities. We all know how vital a good social media strategy is to expand our programs, engage our participants, inspire action, and share our narrative. But what exactly is a good social media strategy and how do we use it effectively to elevate teen voices themselves? Join this unique session of Expanding Your Reach, for an open conversation about all things social media. The session will be facilitated by three of our experienced national directors who have all documented success in leveraging social media as a tool to engage and highlight teens and their awesomeness. We’ll also be taking a bit of a Zoom break and spending most of our time exploring the interactive platform of Gather.town (detailed instructions will be sent to registrants in advance).

This month’s session is Managing: Yourself, Others and Upwards! with Stefan Teodosic.  Solid management skills have never been more important as people/organizations are challenged with alignment, providing feedback, communication, staff resilience levels, building teams and driving results.  The level to which people manage themselves, other people and upwards within the organization is directly related to their overall success, as well as that of their teams and the organization.  Most often, these are also the skills that aren’t identified/developed when promoting employees, onboarding new managers and working with existing managers.  This session will touch on management theory and build a tool kit for immediate implementation.

*For Youth professionals AND their supervisors​​*
As professionals, we are often drawn to this work because we are passionate about our organization’s mission and have a strong desire to support and to serve others. With this good intention at heart, we sometimes find ourselves in situations where it becomes difficult to say “no,” and hold boundaries. This can lead to burnout, dissatisfaction, and decreased motivation and drive. This session will help you explore how the values that drive us can contribute to our burnout and will help you personally answer the question: How do we balance our passion for our work with our need to protect and sustain ourselves as individuals? Placing our values along a continuum, we will investigate how and where our values are serving us and/or hurting us. We will practice recognizing our burnout trends and explore how to effectively hold boundaries.
*Based on experience and feedback, we know that many of the learnings from this session are more meaningful and much easier implemented when they are shared throughout an organization.  We want to encourage you to invite your supervisor to join you in exploring this important and timely topic.  For this reason, there will be multiple breakout options depending on your organizational role.  We hope your supervisor will be able to join us to learn more about managing their own boundaries while also supporting the staff they supervise.*
Session Learning Objectives:
● Know: Professionals will identify values that drive us in our work and explore how those values fuel or fight our tendency to feel burnt out.
● Do: Professionals will build strategies to implement realistic and effective boundaries to help fight personal burnout
● Feel: Professionals will feel empowered in understanding our burnout trends and optimistic about our ability to use that understanding to better care for ourselves