J'Burgh

Wow, hard to believe my trip is coming to an end. It has been an amazing two weeks in this fabulous country. The ROI Conference was spectacular, and I know that there will be a lot of follow up and great opportunities for J’Burgh to work with this community. The conference ended with a pool party on the roof of the Marina Hotel, excellent networking sessions and a great presentation form the Reut Institute.

Over the weekend, I’ve been staying with David Harel, enjoying the beach and working on my tan! Tonight I’ll be joining the majority of Israelis and watching the world cup finals. Needless to say, I’m very excited to continue blogging once returning to the United States.

Yesterday afternoon, we broke out into different professional development sessions. I spent some more time with Wendy Rosov learning tips about grant writing and how to build relationships with different foundations and then learned about “The Art of Negotiating”, with Lisa Eisen, National Director of the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation. Both sessions where spectacular and will not only benefit the work I’m doing with J’Burgh, but also my own professional growth.

In the evening, we heard a moving speech from Gilad Shalit’s brother and sister. The Shalit family is currently marching to Jerusalem, rallying support for the release of their son who has been held prisoner by Hamas for the past 4 years, and not been allowed visits from the red cross! It was an amazing experience and a reminder of how much the conflict here in Israel really touches everyone and everything.

After this, we were treated to a showcase of the talented artists participating in this conference. There were a number of fantastic film presentations including comedy from Michelle Collins, music from Michelle Citrin and mc’d by Marcus Freed.

Today has been filled with all sorts of meetings and sessions focused on how we can build the ROI network. There are a lot of great ideas that I’m going to be bringing back to Pittsburgh, and I’m very excited to see what sorts of new projects we can engage our participants in. More on this to come this fall.

Tonight we will be heading to a VIP reception in Jerusalem, should be a great evening followed by some World Cup action.

So, yesterday I arrived at Kfar Maccabiah for the ROI conference and was excited to see a number of familiar faces!

The conference started with a one on one meeting with Wendy Rosov of Rosov consulting. Wendy and I discussed the challenges of running a start up organization like J’Burgh with a focuse on moving from seed funding to “Mezzanine Funding”. As we move forward and expand, it will be very important for J’Burgh to seek new streams of revenue from both local and national foundations and donors, (if you know of anyone who would like to help us out, please let me know). After this meeting, we were treated to an excellent dinner followed by opening ceremonies and ice breakers, truly a great first day.

This morning started with a presentation from conductor Itay Talgam. Itay is the conductor of the Tel Aviv Symphony, and a TED presenter. You can view the TED presentation here.  Itay used his presentation to show how different conductors portray leadership, it was an amazing lecture, however I must say that being the son of a musician, my mother’s greatest fear was that one day I would grow up to become a conductor After this talk we broke out into speed networking groups, and listened to different power point presentations on what our fellow ROI’ers are up to. There are so many great opportunities for J’Burgh to connect to these amazing programs taking place all over the world, and it will be great to watch this network flourish for future collaborations.

I’ll try and get another post up later tonight!

After a wonderful Shabbat in Jerusalem, with Efrat, I have arrived at the ROI conference. The conference is a gathering of young Jewish innovators from all over the world, and I’m actually lucky enough to be sharing a room with Uri Levin. Uri is from Karmiel and staffed a Pittsburgh / Karmiel teen leadership mission with me in 2007. Uri currently works as a production manager for a local nonprofit theater in Tel Aviv and is doing some very interesting work building community through the arts! The conference will serve as an excellent opportunity for me to learn about other young adults initiatives and programs happening all over the world, and I’m really looking forward to seeing what we can bring to Pittsburgh over the course of the next year! I’ll continue to blog more from the conference as different events take place.

Hello and welcome to the J’Burgh blog!  We’ll be using this space to update everyone on what’s going on with the organization and our staff.  Stay tuned for live updates from J’Burgh Director David Katz’s trip to Israel for the ROI community conference.