Strengthening communities begins with strong leaders – leaders who engage with a vision and build a strategy whilst nurturing and empowering both current and future leaders.
Many synagogue leaders shared their stresses and revealed that they spend too much time on maintenance and putting out fires and that too few people are willing to step up, lead or participate with the same people being stretched thinner and thinner.
We are therefore building a new set of ambitious habits for congregational renewal across Reform Judaism. Together we are creating a group of multigenerational leaders, creating a robust leadership structure, unravelling the concept of community organising and responding with communal strategies to Re-Imagine Leadership.
At the core of the initiative is a series of training days provided to clergy, community professionals and lay leaders. The training includes community organising, running successful house meetings and getting better in conducting personal One-to-One meetings.
At the implementation stage, Reform Judaism partners the communities who are committed to their chosen leadership project. To achieve this, we employ a community organiser for 2 days per month, for the duration of 9-12 months, for each community. The organiser’s role is to provide further training and to support the project team with mapping the community, conducting a listening campaign and acting upon what they have heard from the members.
To date we have trained over 200 leaders. Some have taken small steps to improve the way they run meetings or generally become more relational and some have built teams and have decided to take part in the initiative on a project of their choice.
For further details on how your community can get involved in this initiative, please contact us on CommunityPartnership@rjuk.org or join our Yammer group by clicking here and selecting ‘Leadership Initiative’ group.