seeding a new field of jewish education
THEORY OF CHANGE
The Jewish community farming field integrates Jewish experiential education with agriculture in order to cultivate community, promote environmental sustainability and food justice, foster opportunities for meaningful spiritual engagement and personal growth, and strengthen Jewish life.
“I feel more strongly connected to the land and the efforts we are undertaking to repair the world. My choices, in Jewish and non-Jewish circles, have a deep impact on our planet.”
Field-Wide Report
In the winter of 2019, Initiative leaders partnered with Informing Change to conduct a formal baseline evaluation of program outcomes across Initiative organizations, to understand the impact of Jewish community farming on participants and document the current state of the field. This inaugural field-level evaluation was shepherded by an Initiative task force, called the Evaluation Community of Practice, which also guided the Initiative’s development of a field-level Theory of Change and shared metrics in 2018. The evaluation results presented in this report are intended to establish baseline metrics that can be used to understand changes and growth in the field over the coming years.
Learning from our work:
Gender Equity
Feedback from JCF Field Building gatherings and in data collected by Change Craft in the course of their 2016 Field Mapping Report, gender equity arose as a persistent concern among members of the field.
This information led to the creation of a gender equity intervention, initiated in the summer of 2017.
Abundance Farm
In March of 2019, a survey was launched to explore the value of Abundance Farm to the current membership of the Jewish institutions it serves and to determine if the farm has had any influence on members’ decisions to enroll or join these institutions. The findings were incredible.
