Hazon, meaning “vision" in Hebrew, aims to create healthier and more sustainable communities in the Jewish world and beyond, and shift the nature of what it means to be Jewish in the 21st century. Connecting traditional Jewish teachings to modern day issues surrounding the environment, food, and sustainability, Hazon builds programs and events that give people a chance to explore their relationship between the physical world and their Judaism. Many of Hazon's programs are responding to a need within the Jewish community to engage and reengage young people in today's contemporary issues in a meaningful, modern, and authentically Jewish way. Hazon food programs, for example, build on the ideas that as Jews, we've been thinking about kashrut – about what is “fit" to eat – for nearly 3,000 years and that a growing number of people today realize that our food choices have significant ramifications for ourselves, our families, and the world around us. Hazon stands at the forefront of the Jewish Food Movement, leading Jews to think more broadly and deeply about our own food choices through the development of food education programs, curricula, and farm fellowships. Hazon beneficiaries span all walks of Jewish life and beyond, from families and young adults to athletes and educators. Hazon's overall goal is that individuals and institutions in the Jewish community are living measurably healthier and more sustainable lives, through awareness of their actions and through viewing their decisions as a reflection of core Jewish values.
Hazon uses food and the outdoors to engage people in programs that confront complex, engaging challenges and needs of the world today. The strategies used to accomplish this fall into three categories: Transformative Experiences, Thought-Leadership, and Capacity-Building. • Transformative Experiences: These include participating in one of our Bike Rides, or our Food Conferences, joining a multi-week Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program, and participating in a multi-day retreat, holiday program, educational workshop, conference, food festival, or all-inclusive vacation. Individuals, families, and communities make these journeys to experience a Judaism that connects with their passions – and they return home transformed, refreshed, inspired, and with a renewed sense of purpose and possibility for a sustainable future in the Jewish community and beyond. • Thought-Leadership: This includes writing, speaking, teaching, curriculum-development, and advocacy. Hazon has produced a wide collection of curricula, source books, and resources that explore the connections between Jewish traditions, environmental issues, and food justice. We have numerous resources on food and contemporary issues, Shmita: the sabbatical year in Jewish life, and an award winning blog, The Jew & the Carrot. • Capacity-Building: Hazon seeks to not only create a direct impact through our own programs, but also to support and network great people and projects in North America and Israel. This includes our fiscal sponsorship of other organizations and on-going projects such as Makom Hadash and Siach: Environment and Social Justice Conversation, and distributing over $2 million from our Bike Rides as grants to organizations for projects in Jewish Outdoor Food and Environmental Education. We used our fiscal sponsorship program to launch now successful, independent programs such as Urban Adamah and Wildnerness Torah. We are proud of our ability to engage the entire spectrum of Jewish community across differences in gender, age, geography, socioeconomic status, denominational status, family makeup, sexual orientation, and observance level. Hazon events create short-term intentional communities that break down barriers to build the Jewish community as a whole. We are also proud of leading the Jewish Outdoor, Food, Farming and Environmental Education (JOFEE) Movement. We engage tens of thousands of Jews in living their values while re-energizing and renewing Jewish life in the process, and ultimately reframing what it means to be Jewish in the 21st century. Leadership development and collaborative partnerships have been key strengths of Hazon since its inception. All Hazon projects have steering committees or planning teams comprised of volunteers who play an essential role in our work. Each year, Hazon engages over 700 volunteers, utilizing them at every level of program planning, implementation, and to partner with staff to design and put programs into action.
Hazon has offices in New York, Denver, Boulder, San Diego, Falls Village (Connecticut), and Detroit. As of January 2014, Hazon merged with the Isabella Freedman Jewish Retreat Center, doubling its staff and budget and positioning itself for tremendous organizational growth. Over the next 5-10 years, Hazon plans to allocate its resources to growing the Jewish Outdoor, Food, Farming and Environmental Education (JOFEE) movement to be firmly established as an important modality across the American Jewish community. Hazon's overall goal is that individuals and institutions who participate in JOFEE programs will, in return, live measurably healthier and more sustainable lives and view their actions as a reflection of core Jewish values. Hazon's collaborative ethic is one of the ways we are distinct from other Jewish environmental organizations. Supporting allied organizations is a priority for Hazon; we do this is by providing grants to organizations that share Hazon's core values. Since our first Bike Ride in 2000, Hazon has become one of the largest funders of the Jewish environmental movement, having given away over $2 million to more than 130 organizations and projects as part of Hazon's mini-grant program. Our fiscal sponsorship program also supports new organizations in early stages of development. Working closely with partners and cohort organizations, we advance the conversation around Jewish environmental sustainability and in 2010, launched Makom Hadash, a shared space for second-stage Jewish non-profits in lower Manhattan. Through the development of the mini-grant, fiscal sponsorship, and Makom Hadash programs, Hazon has created successful, sustainable vehicles for achieving success internally, regionally, nationally, and in Israel. In Early 2014, Hazon released Seeds of Opportunity, the national study on Jewish Outdoor, Food, Farming and Environmental Education (JOFEE). This study was designed to research how immersive food, outdoor, farming and environmental educational experiences influence the Jewish learning, growth, and involvement of participants, what they can teach us about how to provide effective and compelling learning experiences integrating Jewish education with food, environment, and the outdoors, and how we support professionals working in this space. Hazon has systematically released the results to the Jewish community and expects the communal conversation, funding, and programming to be Hazon's next major organizational milestone over the coming years. Being at the forefront of the JOFEE movement, Hazon is now launching a fellowship in Jewish Outdoor, Food, Farming and Environmental Education, which will train fellows in JOFEE areas, and then disperse them to conduct JOFEE programing in Jewish communities around the nation.
For most programs, we gauge success through online evaluations and in-depth interviews with program participants and key stakeholders. We continue to conduct extensive debriefs after every event with staff and volunteer leadership to assess all aspects of the event in order to plan even stronger programs for the future. Our surveys give us a wealth of information, both quantitative and qualitative. We are weaving concrete evaluation measures more deeply and proactively into all our programs than ever before, using the results of our evaluations to iteratively strengthen all that we do. With longer term programs, such as Adamah and Teva, we also maintain a network to track alumni accomplishments. With the Jewish Greening Fellowship, we measure energy efficiency measures added and additional governmental funds leveraged for environmental upgrades to Jewish agencies in the New York area, now totaling over $3. 3 million since the start of the Fellowship program. We strongly believe that through our programs and initiatives, we are successfully responding to the needs of the Jewish community and world by engaging in today's contemporary issues in a meaningful, modern, and authentically Jewish way.
Hazon has continued to demonstrate great strength in four important areas: • Innovation: we're continuing to engage the Jewish community in the most critical issues of our day through a Jewish lens, particularly by expanding and deepening our leadership in the Jewish Outdoor, Food, Farming and Environmental Education (JOFEE) movement and through the inclusion of cutting-edge, hands-on education at Isabella Freedman; • Impact: Interest in our work continues to expand across the board and we are seeing the transformative effects of our work both on individuals and on Jewish institutions across the board; • Leadership: Hazon empowers our staff, volunteers, and participants to become leaders in their communities. Through our emphasis on thought-leadership, including writing and teaching, Hazon is able to bring in a large audience. We provide leadership locally around the country to partners, CSA's, and our Jewish Food Education Network now with over 300 members; • Organizational effectiveness: Hazon prides itself on maximizing our resources and leveraging our partnerships. We have offices in New York, Connecticut, Boulder, Denver, San Diego, and Detroit, each partnering with different organizations in their areas. We continue to launch new initiatives while building and improving on flagship programs. We are engaging new donors, both individuals and foundations, and our work and brand enjoys wider recognition in the Jewish community every year. The Jewish environmental field has grown and strengthened and we are proud of our leadership role in this expansion. The biggest challenge we face is keeping pace with the demand for our work, which continues to grow and to stretch our staff and our resources more each year. Success for Hazon over the next several years includes expansion of all the on-the-ground components of our work that have already been so successful, development of materials and programs to engage new leadership in the movement, and training a cadre of leaders to move this work forward. Our greatest success continues to rest on positioning the Jewish community at the forefront in grappling with the most critical issues of our time, empowering new leadership to take the reins with strong training and compelling resources, and, through this work, ultimately reframing what it means to be Jewish in today's world.
