Legacy Fund Week 8 - Towards cohorts

by Rabbi Nate DeGroot

The three actifests we prototyped in 2024 were amazing! And yet, we sensed that there was a ceiling to the catalyzing possibilities of that model.

First, we hit our own internal capacity after organizing just three actifests. To build a national movement, we needed to figure out how to have more scalable and sustainable impact given our organizational resources. We are a team of only two full-time employees, after all.

Second, for our work to really embody a Jewish post-activism, we needed to make sure mystery and possibility remained present and alive in the “how” of our organizing, trusting organic growth, following momentum, and not locking ourselves into just one particular modality or form. Instructively, the Chapter 9 Project had the broadest impact of any of our 2024 projects, and as a digital and distributed publication, it wasn’t even technically an “actifest” as we had been imagining the term. Going forward, we want to invite in and affirm diverse modalities of expression.

And third, the actifest model limited us to collaborating with people only from the cities where we were organizing actifests. But I had met dozens of people from all over the country and world who were energized by our approach and resonated with our vision! Was I supposed to tell them to hang tight for 3-5 years until we planned an actifest in their city? We needed to figure out ways to not gatekeep people’s enthusiasm, but maximize and channel it! It was clear to me that to seed a Jewish post-activism, we had to orient around and invest in amazing people.

Towards cohorts

While we continue to prioritize public learning, thought-leadership, internally organized actifests, and broader movement solidarity, to solve for the questions above and to maximize our impact, we are embracing cohorts as a core part of The Shalom Center’s work going forward.

We are mobilizing grasstops and grassroots Jewish leaders into emergent and dynamic cohorts to explore Jewish post-activism and experiment with new and creative expressions of it.

Together, these cohorts will weave networks across disciplines and geography, create original resources and surprising interventions for liberation, develop dynamic relationships, provide a new pipeline of Jewish leaders, and offer the field a new/ancient perspective on Jewish social justice. If “artist,” “activist,” and “seeker” are three circles of a venn diagram, these cohorts will exist somewhere in the overlap, where creative spiritual transformation and a whole lot of possibility live.

Instead of mounting three actifests per year, we will now engage dozens of cohort members, each proliferating their own experiments in expressions of Jewish post-activism, be they ritual pop-up actifests, art installations, digital and print pieces, film, music, and more.

With this model, we are tapping into a cultural zeitgeist of folks who are asking similar questions, sensing that new pathways are needed, and enthused to experiment with original/ancient approaches. Our work bridges the Jewish social justice movement with the global movement of post-activism to create something unique and emergent. 

I am very excited to announce that next week we are launching our very first cohort, made-up of 23 incredible folks from around the country and world who are deeply and creatively exploring Jewish post-activism together! I can’t wait to introduce you to them in my email next week!

Then in future years, we aim to grow, scale, and adapt this work, experimenting with different cohort models (based on identity, location, holiday, etc) and varied structures (short-term vs long-term). We’d also love to organize multi-day, public, immersive Jewish post-activist convenings.

We know big movements consist of lots of little movements, and through our new cohort models, we aim to do our part in ushering in the world that yearns to be born, striving for and contributing to wholeness for the world to come. 

If you are excited by this evolution in our thinking, I’d be excited to hear from you! If you want to learn more about future cohort opportunities and think this might be something you’d want to get involved in, don’t hesitate to reach out!

And if you want to see this vision come to fruition in the years to come, please donate generously today, so we can keep building momentum, recruit and invest in new leaders, proliferate expressions of Jewish post-activism, and bring more sacred justice into the world.

With blessings,

-Rabbi Nate