Says Program for Young Hillel Professionals is Outdated
In what Hillel is describing as a sign of an increased institutional emphasis on engaging uninvolved Jewish students, Hillel has discontinued its Jewish Campus Service Corps Fellowship, a 14-year-old program that sent recent college graduates to join the staffs of local Hillels across the country. An early experiment in alternative engagement, the JCSC Fellowship tasked fellows with interacting with students outside of the Hillel environment. Today, according to Hillel, increased institutional emphasis on engaging unengaged students has made the JCSC Fellowship redundant.
Founded with a grant from philanthropist Michael Steinhardt’s foundation in 1994, the Fellowship paid 70 to 80 fellows each year to work full-time at local Hillels. Tasked with reaching out to unaffiliated Jewish students, Fellows held office hours at the local Jamba Juice, staffed tables advertising Hillel activities in the student center, and organized events.
The Fellowship also served as a means of attracting young professionals to careers at Hillel. Says Simon Amiel, who served as Director of the JCSC Fellowship, “[The JCSC program] was a feeder not only for Hillel, but also the worldwide Jewish community.”
According to Amiel, Hillel simply outgrew the JCSC program. “At the time that it was crafted, Hillel wasn’t focusing on students who were under engaged. Now we’re really emphasizing that. Everyone’s doing it at Hillel now. Hillel has changed too much to have [them as] sole practitioners of engagement.”
Former JCSC fellows have reported that at some campuses, the local staff did not allow the JCSC fellows to focus on outreach to uninvolved students. “I think that a lot of schools don’t use their fellows the way they were created [to be used] 14 years ago,” says Erin Searle, a JCSC fellow at the Denver Hillel in 2007.
Despite Hillel’s position that the JCSC program had become redundant, two initiatives have been positioned to replace the JCSC. In 2006, Hillel introduced the Campus Entrepreneur Initiative, which now employs undergraduates on over 30 campuses. The Initiative pays students with minimal Jewish backgrounds approximately $10 per hour to bring other students to Hillel activities on campus. Mike Sabes, a senior at UCLA and a CEI intern, says that at an orientation at the beginning of the program, interns were taught how to approach students on campus about events. Sabes says that JCSC fellows were not perceived to be “as cool as CEI interns.” While a JCSC fellow was seen by students as a “Hillel poster-child.” he says, CEI interns “are more like undercover students.”
In addition to CEI, Hillel International announced on August 7th that Hillels across the country hired a batch of Engagement Professionals for the 2008-2009 school year. A Hillel website had previously recommended that students who had been planning to apply to the JCSC program apply to be Engagement Professionals. Amiel described the Engagement Professionals as full-time positions created by individual Hillels, as opposed to an administered program like the JCSC.
Many former JCSC fellows are unhappy with the discontinuation of the Fellowship. “I think that it’s important to have a younger engagement professional on staff, closer to the age of the students,” says Casey Topol, a JCSC fellow at the University of Florida in 2007. “We’re the same age, we know what it’s like to be in college.
“I know what’s going on in their everyday lives,” says Rachel Williams, a JCSC fellow at Indiana University in 2007. “A year ago, I was a student myself. I would just say, be cautious if you’re hiring someone to do this work who is 25, 26. [They’re] a bit more removed from college life.”
