Joshua Venture Stages A Second Act

Lisa Lepson, Joshua Venture Group’s newly hired executive director, has a background in secular social entrepreneurship.

Lisa Lepson, Joshua Venture Group’s newly hired executive director, has a background in secular social entrepreneurship.

by Tamar Snyder
Staff Writer

After a four-year hiatus, the Joshua Venture Group has hired a new executive director and will begin soliciting applications for its third cohort of Jewish change-makers.

Joshua Venture Group’s Dual Investment Program will offer eight fellows $80,000 of “seed funding” spread over two years, in addition to twice yearly retreats, individual coaching, and stipends to cover health benefits and advanced professional training.

Originally conceived in 1998 with funding from the Nathan Cummings Foundation, the Righteous Persons Foundation and the Walter and Elise Haas Fund, Joshua Venture (now renamed Joshua Venture Group) sought to train and empower young Jewish leaders and social entrepreneurs. “They were influenced by the burgeoning field of secular social entrepreneurship, and they wanted to create a similar model

to support Jewish social entrepreneurship,” says Lisa Lepson, Joshua Venture Group’s executive director.
Despite bragging rights about its successful alumni roster — including JDub’s Aaron Bisman, Sharsheret’s Rochelle Shoretz, and Storahtelling’s Amichai Lau-Lavie, among others — Joshua Venture Group suffered from management and governance issues, as well as a rolling deficit since 2002, insiders say. In 2005, the board decided against recruiting the next cohort of fellows, and the organization underwent a thorough evaluation process to determine what went wrong and figure out how to best restructure the program for future success.

“For us to close up shop and take off our shingle and say we’re done, that would not maximize the value of the initial investment,” says Marcella Kanfer Rolnick, a relatively new board member at the time who drove the effort to re-launch Joshua Venture Group along with Center for Leadership Initiatives’ Yonatan Gordis, who co-authored the JVG curriculum and now serves on the advisory committee.

After spending close to eight months talking to 50 stakeholders, the board came up with two key findings: Joshua Venture Group needed to appoint a board that was independent of its funders and must be fully funded before selecting its next cohort. Joshua Venture Group also decided to move its headquarters from the San Francisco Bay Area to Manhattan.

Together with support from the Lippman Kanfer Family Foundation and the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation, Joshua Venture Group raised $4 million from The Stanford and Joan Alexander Foundation, The Nathan Cummings Foundation and the Akron Legacy and Endowment Fund. “They were very deliberate to ensure complete funding for five years,” says Lepson. “In its last incarnation, Joshua Venture was soliciting funders at the same time as its fellows were soliciting funding, often focused on the very same funders.”

The landscape of Jewish social entrepreneurship looks very different than it did when Joshua Venture first came on the scene more than a decade ago. “Joshua Venture in itself was an innovation,” Gordis says. “No one talked about ‘social entrepreneurship’ then. There were even debates about whether to use the term because no one knew what it meant.”

Today, Jewish social entrepreneurship has grown into what experts dub “The Innovation Sector,” with the founding of more than 300 Jewish startups with operating budgets of under $2 million since 1998. According to Jewish Jumpstart’s “2008 Survey of New Jewish Organizations,” sponsored by the Natan Fund and The Samuel Bronfman Foundation, nearly $500 million has been raised by new Jewish startups, with the Jewish Innovation Sector representing a $100 million economy in 2008 alone.
“Joshua Venture Group won’t be the lone player anymore,” says Gordis. “It’s part of a community supporting social entrepreneurship,” including Bikkurim, which was founded soon after Joshua Venture, as well as PresenTense, ROI, CLI, UpStart Bay Area and others.

Lepson sees these other players as “potential pipelines.” They do great work in planting seeds of great ideas, she says. “Then we can come in and select what we perceive to be the best of those ideas and potential leaders and sink our teeth into supporting them.”

In carving out its niche, Joshua Venture Group has refused to define the word “young” in “young Jewish social entrepreneur.” Anyone 18 or older may apply.

Those with for-profit business models for creating social change in the Jewish community will be welcome, as well as “intrapreneurs” who have the latitude and capability to affect change within existing Jewish organizations.

“I believe the words ‘Jewish social entrepreneur’ actually mean something,” says Alan Cohen, chair of the JVG’s board and a professional at UJA-Federation of New York. “It’s not just that it’s new. It’s about trying to address problems or challenges in the Jewish community in ways that transform the way we do things.”
Unlike Bikkurim, a successful incubator serving Jewish social entrepreneurs in the New York area, JVG aims to have a national reach, which is reflected somewhat by the geographical diversity of its board. “Someone living in St. Louis or Denver should not just have a backyard view” of the social entrepreneurial movement, says Kanfer Rolnick. “JVG is seeking out fellows whose ideas can be scaled so as to have a greater impact beyond the community they live in.”

There’s a special emphasis on sustainability, says Seth Cohen (no relation to Alan Cohen), an attorney in Atlanta who sits on the board of Joshua Venture Group and is an active lay leader of the Jewish Federation of Greater Atlanta. “I want my community in Atlanta to continue to mature in more innovative and imaginative way,” he says.

JVG also plans to broaden its reach and collaborate with and learn best practices from secular social entrepreneurship efforts. “That’s one of the reason Lisa was so attractive to us,” says Alan Cohen. “A lot of her talent was groomed and cultivated in broader social enterprises that didn’t focus on the Jewish community. There’s expertise out there that we definitely want to tap into.” Before joining JVG, Lepson served as global director of nonprofit services at RockCorps, a social venture that engages youth in volunteerism through the power of music. Prior to that, she was one of the first staffers at Upwardly Global, a social entrepreneurial organization that brings underemployed immigrant professionals and employers together.

“We don’t want just inside-the-Beltway applicants,” says Kanfer Rolnick. “There’s a high proportion of Jewish participants in the secular social venture world. We want to reach out to them and let them know that they can do their work through a Jewish lens.”

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