Leading, impact and moving forward: Reflections from four pioneering Jewish community executives

Stepping away from leadership is just as important as stepping into it. In eJewishPhilanthropy, Idit Klein (Keshet), Jodi Bromberg (18Doors), Aliza Kline (OneTable), and Dori Frumin Kirshner (Matan) — who have each led their organizations through significant growth — discuss their decisions to leave at the height of their impact. On the podcast It’s Who You Know!, they reflect on leadership transitions, the need for sustainability in Jewish communal work, and why knowing when to go is a crucial part of knowing how to lead.

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MIT SMR: What Leaders Get Wrong About Employee Motivation

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NonProfit PRO: 3 Strategies to Bridge Generational Gaps for a Better Connected Nonprofit Board

HBR: When Activist Investors Ask for Board Seats

Here's what the Leading Edge team is learning about culture, executives, and boards this month.

What We're Learning | March 2025

The best of what the Leading Edge team is learning about culture, executives, and boards.

What We're Learning

As of January 1, 2025, Leading Edge and JPro have joined forces to support, engage, and develop Jewish nonprofit leaders and professionals, creating a central hub that empowers them to deepen their impact at a critical time for the Jewish community. As part of this, we welcome eight new team members from JPro. Learn more about each of them below. 

As of January 1, 2025, Leading Edge and JPro have joined forces to support, engage, and develop Jewish nonprofit leaders and professionals, creating a central hub that empowers them to deepen their impact at a critical time for the Jewish community. As part of this, we welcome eight new team members from JPro.

Meet our New Team Members

Meet the people driving change at Leading Edge. Together, we're shaping the future of Jewish nonprofit leadership.

Our Team

During my undergraduate years, I was accredited to be a high school English and history teacher in Ontario. I taught supplementary school at my synagogue from 10th grade through university and I loved teaching. But as I was moving towards graduation, I felt curious about what else I might explore before going into the classroom. My roommate encouraged me to apply for a service learning alternative spring break trip to El Salvador during my last semester of undergrad, which sounded cool, and it ended up being with American Jewish World Service. Long story short, that turned into an offer to move to New York for one year to be the AJWS Alternative Breaks Fellow, which I did in September 2002. I thought I'd go for one year, and it turned into my career. 

I think a large segment of people who identify as Jewish communal professionals see themselves as accidental Jewish communal professionals. Like, it wasn't necessarily the plan, or they sort of fell into it sideways. And that was my story — it wasn't what I planned, but the path makes sense in retrospect. 

Let's talk about JPro's story. I'm especially interested in the decision, shortly before your time, to rebrand the Jewish Communal Service Association of North America as JPro. Beyond going from a long name to a short one, what motivated the rebrand?

JPro traces its history to 1899. And one of the remarkable things about that history is the number of times that it reinvented itself. It's a lot like Jewish history: There's continuity and change, and that ability to be elastic enough to move with the times but also connected enough to the past to maintain the through-line is part of what's extraordinary about this organization. JPro’s history dovetails with, has been informed by, and has also informed the development of the North American Jewish community.  The rebrand, I believe, was about a desire to catch up with the times, infuse a different kind of energy, and speak to younger generations as we worked to serve the Jewish communal workforce more and better.

What mandate were you given when you were brought on as the leader two years later?

The board was looking for an executive who would lead from the front with a vision — who would really look hard at what should continue and what shouldn't continue. And it was fascinating: As I got to know all of the stakeholders, everybody had a different perspective on what was essential to maintain! If I had listened to everybody, we wouldn't have changed anything. 

So we set a single-minded, big, hairy, audacious goal of tripling our number of JPro Affiliates over three years. We needed to re-establish the value proposition for becoming a JPro Affiliate. What I said internally is: If we cannot grow from 95 to 300 affiliates over three years, then there is something fundamentally broken about the value proposition for the organization. So by focusing on that goal, we were able to park a number of things off to the side without adjudicating them because we had that one shared goal that we were all driving towards. And people even believed in that so much that we secured 70 new affiliates before launching our first new programs: WellAdvised and JPro Master Classes. 

How would you tell the story of the arc from setting that goal through the uniting of JPro and Leading Edge?

I look back at three chapters. The first was from the beginning of 2017 through our conference in Detroit in August of 2019. And that chapter was an entrepreneurial, almost startup-like mentality. Everyone’s sleeves were rolled up, and we had rapid cycles of experimentation, learning, and refinement.

Chapter two: Coming out a conference that exceeded our hopes, we developed our first business plan. That was about solidifying our base of services to the end users in the field and growing the resources we needed to enable that. During those years we doubled from a team of three to a team of six. And, less than one year later, we adapted our work to respond to urgent needs of our audience during the early months of the COVID pandemic.

Our 2022 conference in Cleveland, in partnership with JFNA, was the transition to our third chapter. Once again, the conference sold out with a waiting list and exceeded expectations. Immediately thereafter we developed our next business plan with the headline of “Scaled Impact.” That plan asked: What would it look like to make change at the field-wide level? How can we shift attitudes and behaviors? We were interested in developing methodologies for how to do that, and also really moving the needle on management training and early-career interventions. 

And then, about a year and a half into that plan, we changed course and entered serious conversations with Leading Edge which, if successful, would turbocharge our drive to scaled impact. 

Since our 2019 and 2022 conferences were inflection points, it’s fitting that we are planning the next conference as a newly combined team, since it will mark this major milestone for our work and for the future of talent in the Jewish nonprofit sector.

Why were you so quickly positive toward the idea of joining with Leading Edge?

Leading Edge and JPro had been in conversation about their relationship from the first beginnings of Leading Edge. Gali was generous with advice when I reached out during the summer of 2016 when I became a candidate to be JPro’s exec. Everybody agreed that, if we were starting from scratch, nobody would build a Jewish nonprofit sector with a separate JPro and Leading Edge. We also understood that the missions, visions, cultures, programs, and business models had meaningful differences and tensions that needed to be considered. So when Gali and I first met with a consultant to really start discerning whether or not to come together, the big question was: What is in the best interest of the field? 

And our conversation moved into a posture of possibility and bold vision. The conversation was never about “How can we be more efficient, how can we do the same amount of output with fewer resources?” It was about, “What does it look like to scale and amplify impact?” We talked about things like a comprehensive approach to talent across the field through the entire talent cycle. Whether we're talking about recruitment, development, engagement, retention, and career pathing, or about the talent lifecycle from the perspective of organizations, what could it look like for the field to have a workforce and a pipeline that is healthy and vibrant, and to be able to do that in a comprehensive way? More and more we were seeing the limitations of not being in it together. JPro was developing and distributing products and services to the field; Leading Edge is a massive engine of knowing, based on data, what the field needs and was also driving impactful interventions. So to marry those things and have them be mutually reinforcing felt obvious. 

Let me be a provocative proxy for a certain skeptical kind of reader. Let’s say I'm a committed Jew, but I'm not emotionally bought into the idea of the Jewish nonprofit sector as a sector. Several times you've talked about the interest of the field. Why should “the field” have an interest, and why should I care about it? Why can't Jewish communal leaders just learn leadership from the Center for Creative Leadership and managers just learn management from the Management Center and organizations just use Culture Amp for employee surveys? What's the added value of doing all this together through a Jewish-specific lens?

The perseveration that is possible about this question, the sort of philosophizing — “Are we a field? What are the boundaries of the field?” — at the beginning, I found that to be a distraction, so I studiously avoided spending time on it because it seemed to me like work avoidance that was inhibiting bold action. That is a place of spinning wheels. And there is enough of a history and a broad-based and highly networked committed core of our field, doing the work of building the field and being a field. Defining our boundaries and justifying the reality that we are a field just wasn’t the place to begin. I think if we describe what is, we will see all the ways that we are a field in the relationships, in the ways that we collaborate, in the ways that we argue, even if we disagree… To the extent that we are in the conversation about whether we’re a community, and there’s a committed core that believes we are…well, then we are. (And, I would argue that those who are highly engaged in critiques about whether and how we are a field are also in an important relationship with this professional community.) We have shared third-rail issues, shared conversations. We come back to shared models, shared funding institutions, and the shared institutional identity of being a Jewish organization. Now, not everyone sees it that way. There have been organizations that said, “We're not going to be JPro Affiliates. We don't see ourselves as part of the field.” Okay, fine; there are thousands of organizations and people who do, so let's start there.

What are you most personally proud of from your role as CEO of JPro? And don't be humble and talk about pride in the organization. I want to know: What are you most proud to have personally done?

I think that my superpower is being able to move quickly from discomfort to growth. There are some things that have come less naturally to me than to some other people in positions like mine, but I’ve been able to look at the gaps and seek support to accomplish big things. I was terrified when I started this job, and I was open with some real gedolim [“great ones”] in our field about that. One shared with me that when he started in his job, he felt the same way and told me that it would take two years to get my sea legs. His normalizing that was incredibly helpful. I think it’s unfortunate that we don't speak publicly about those realities in the field and maintain the mythology of the hero-leader. Somehow the persona that executive leaders typically portray is of being confident and charismatic and successful... I think we do ourselves a disservice by being less honest. But every big accomplishment at JPro was the work of a team. I’m proud of how I’ve facilitated the circumstances in which groups, together have made the impossible possible. And it never ends. I've joked after our conferences that the reward of reaching the summit of a mountain is always another, bigger mountain. 

What has it been like going from a CEO role to a non-CEO C-suite role?

This has been a rollercoaster for everybody with lots of highs, some lows, some exhilaration, and some stomachaches. I’ve never heard of an M+A process that isn’t complex, so the “big why” has to be clear and worthwhile. If I wanted to, I could spend all day talking about what's hard. Or I could spend all day looking at the incredible opportunities and blessings for me personally and for JPro. And that's where I'm excited to put my energy. I'm working with one of the best executive teams, boards, and staffs in the business. I really mean it, the concentration of talent here is unbelievable. It’s incredible to be at this point in my career and to be at the beginning of a new journey with a steep learning curve. It’s the next mountain. I think about my own sense of mission and purpose as a Jewish communal professional, as a mother, as a granddaughter… In the days after October 7th, I really felt like everything that I grew up to think was true about being a Jew in the world at this moment in history was just lying shattered at my feet. And I just think it is an incredible blessing to be in a professional community and to have work that is, in part, about how we move through that moment as individuals, as organizations, as a field, as a broader Jewish community, in making meaning of our post-October-7th reality. I feel incredibly fortunate to be doing this work, in this field, with this organization, at this time.

Ilana Aisen is the Chief Community Impact Officer at Leading Edge. (Read her complete bio here.) From 2016 through 2024, she was CEO of JPro, which joined with Leading Edge at the beginning of this year. We sat down with Ilana for a conversation about her individual professional journey, JPro’s journey as an organization, and the future of the nonprofit field now that JPro and Leading Edge have come together.

Scaling for Impact: Ilana Aisen Reflects on Growing a Career, an Organization, and a Field

Feedback is one of those things we all know we need — and often struggle to do well. At Leading Edge, we found ourselves in that very place. As an organization that helps Jewish nonprofits build better workplace cultures, we’re constantly looking at how we can live our values and model the practices we advocate. Yet, when it came to feedback, we realized we had work to do.

The need became clear through both formal and informal channels. Our Employee Experience Survey and ongoing conversations revealed that feedback — especially upward and peer-to-peer — wasn’t happening effectively. Team members expressed a lack of openness to constructive conversations and observed that while we were excellent at positive affirmations, they often lacked detail. Without meaningful feedback, growth opportunities were being overlooked, and the culture began to feel surface-level positive rather than deeply supportive.

As the executive team dug into these insights, it became obvious that feedback was about more than improving processes, it was about relationships, development, and trust. We saw the opportunity to make a change by engaging in a feedback workshop series with Frontline Solutions, a program designed to help teams build stronger communication skills.

We had done feedback trainings before, and while they were well-received, they were one-off sessions. This time, we wanted to go deeper, knowing that real change takes time, practice, and commitment.

For the executive team, the workshops offered moments of deep reflection. We joined the full-team sessions while also participating in focused discussions tailored to our own development. These sessions gave us valuable insight into how the team views our current culture and helped us reflect on our leadership behaviors. They pushed us to consider how we need to adjust our approach to better support the culture we’re striving to build. It’s been a powerful process of listening, reflecting, and growing together.

We’ve realized that relying solely on supervisors to address concerns doesn’t always give us the full picture. People can present differently to us than they do to their direct supervisors, so it’s crucial that we share our own observations directly when something stands out. Supervisors may not always see the same patterns or behaviors we do, and leaving these conversations unsaid can lead to missed opportunities for growth and improvement. Power dynamics are a reality, and it’s important for us to stay mindful of them. While we encourage our employees to show up as their authentic selves at work, we also recognize the weight that a conversation with an executive team member can carry. Feedback from us often holds greater significance, and we have a responsibility to approach those moments with care and intention.

The workshops didn’t just focus on how to give feedback; they explored the dynamics between giver and receiver. A key “aha”  moment for us was understanding that feedback isn’t about following a checklist — it’s about meeting the needs of the person receiving it and being mindful of our differences.


One standout exercise paired feedback practice with the Change Styles Indicator, helping us see how individuals approach and respond to change. This realization deepened our feedback process and strengthened relationships. It wasn’t just about improving communication, it was about building trust and understanding.

Impact: Changing the Way We Lead and Connect

Since the workshops, we’re seeing tangible changes across the team:

More openness and collaboration: Team members are volunteering for projects outside their usual responsibilities, often with people outside their core teams. 

Greater accountability: Feedback has started to flow more naturally: upward, downward, and across the organization.

For the executive team, this shift has been significant. We’ve always valued feedback, but we’re now more aware of its complexities. We’ve also learned to manage expectations: while we encourage feedback, we’re clear that not every piece can or will be acted upon. When we can’t take action, we commit to sharing context and being transparent about why.

We know that feedback isn’t a one-time project — it’s a practice. Moving forward, we’re focused on reinforcing what we’ve learned and exploring areas like skip-level feedback (conversations between executives and team members who report to other supervisors).

Historically, we’ve tended to focus on positive skip-level feedback, perhaps contributing to a culture of hyper-positivity. We now see the need to balance that by sharing observations, even when they’re hard. This will require building trust and creating a culture where this kind of feedback is constructive and doesn’t carry disproportionate weight.

Already, we’re seeing team members reach out to the executive team more informally: “can I share what I heard?” or “can I give some advice?” These messages are welcome, and we’re working to make it clear that anyone can schedule time with us, anytime.

We’re also thinking about relationship-building across the team. As we grow, it’s not enough to rely on full-team meetings to create connections. We need to be intentional about building relationships with team members in new and different ways.

Personal Growth: What We’ve Learned as Leaders

For us as an executive team, this work has deepened our awareness of how we communicate and connect. We’re reflecting on our role in holding the big picture of the organization while staying attuned to individual relationships. Feedback is a tool for growth, not just for the team, but for us as leaders as well.

We see this as the beginning of an ongoing journey. Our goal is for Leading Edge to continue to embody what it means to be a great place to work: a welcoming, open culture where every voice matters and every person has the opportunity to grow. The goalpost may keep moving, but we’re committed to staying on the path.

Written by our Chief Program Officer, this article is part of a series highlighting perspectives from various Leading Edge team members as we reflect on our journey through a feedback workshop series.

Leaders Need Feedback Too: Insights from an Executive Team Member

Culture

Mission, Vision, and Jewish Philanthropic Leadership: A Conversation with Rachel Garbow Monroe and Paula B. Pretlow

In a candid conversation, Rachel Garbow Monroe (President & CEO of The Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Foundation and past Leading Edge Board Chair) and Paula B. Pretlow (Chair of the Board of The Harry and Jeannette Weinberg Foundation) reveal how they lead one of America's largest foundations, balancing its Jewish roots with broader community service. They describe their complementary leadership styles and how they've expanded the foundation's impact through diversity initiatives, gender-lens grantmaking, and a commitment to hearing directly from communities they serve.

Jewish Insider: Jewish groups are reassessing their embrace of DEI

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Moneyball Judaism: Quantification Fixations

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McKinsey & Company: Developing a resilient, adaptable workforce for an uncertain future

HBR: Leaders Shouldn’t Try to Do It All

Forbes: Own Your Seat: Six Keys To Success As A Nonprofit Board Member

NonProfit PRO: Why Common Sense Can Prevent Board Governance Failure

HBR: Research: How Boards Can Increase CEO Accountability

What We're Learning | February 2025

As Leading Edge welcomes our newest colleagues, the fantastic team formerly of JPro, I am thinking back to Fall 2008, when I first encountered the history of the organizations that became JPro. 

I was a grad student in NYU’s MPA-MA program in Public & Nonprofit Management and Judaic Studies. (One fellow student: Ilana Aisen, now Chief Community Impact Officer at Leading Edge.) Seeking part-time work, I became a research assistant at the Berman Archive, now at Stanford, then at NYU. (My supervisor: Mordy Walfish, now Leading Edge’s Chief Advancement Officer.) My job was mostly summarizing publications. Today, AI would do it in a fraction of the time! But the state of technology in 2008 helped my Jewish nonprofit education, by exposing me to countless documents from the Jewish nonprofit past — among them, decades of issues of the Journal of Jewish Communal Service. Published under several titles between 1924 and 2013, this was the journal of the succession of organizations that would someday be known as JPro, now part of Leading Edge. (You can still browse this collection.)

Here are three insights I’m reflecting on now from that past experience:

1. Our field has changed a lot in the past century. 

I was struck by the dominance of social work in the journal’s pages. Social work training is still one path into our field, but judging from this journal, early in the 20th Century it appeared to be the path. Partly, this relates to the major issues facing the community at the time — meeting the needs of the 1880-1924 influx of Eastern European Jewish immigrants, an economic, social, and cultural shock that took years (generations) to address. Of course, many of the issues facing the Jewish community of the early 20th Century are still part of our field, from fighting antisemitism to addressing poverty and more. But other concerns, technological possibilities, and changes in the surrounding society that we face in today’s field would strike a Jewish communal worker of the 1920s, or even the 1980s, as alien. 

2. Our field can be like a family — sometimes literally. 

A sense of “family” at work can be good — closeness, trust — or bad — boundaries can break down between the personal and professional. But for me, in that job, the work/family boundary broke down in a surprisingly literal and delightful way. Assigned to me, randomly among multiple research assistants (but guided to me I can only say by Providence), was an article by my own grandfather, Herman Weinheimer, who was executive director of the Jewish Community Service Society of Buffalo. I later discovered that the journal’s archive had two articles by him (1, 2), and an obituary after his untimely passing when my mother was just a baby. He was an amazing man whom I never got to meet; I have only photos, family stories, and documents — including German documents showing his arrest and incarceration at Dachau in 1938; American immigration documents just weeks later, after he luckily received a U.S. visa and the Nazis (at that early date) were willing to let him emigrate; military documents showing his return to Germany with the U.S. Army. My family knew those documents. But of the last, less dramatic chapter of his life — when he was a Jewish communal professional making life a little better for the Buffalo Jewish community — we had no documentation, until finding these articles. The Jewish communal professional field practically reached out and told me it was my heritage even before I joined it.

3. The Jewish communal field’s history should be more celebrated. 

As Leading Edge and JPro unite, I’ve been thinking about the Jewish communal professional identity. It deserves to be stronger. All of us who work in this field (whether Jewish or not) should have a stronger sense that “Jewish communal professional” is an identity (among others) that we embrace and celebrate. Our field is remarkable, and I think one underrated source of pride in our field is its history. The history of Israel advocacy, being still so central, is I think well known enough. But how many Jewish professionals know that it was Jewish Federations that inspired United Way? Or the contributions of all those Jewish social workers to the field of social work as a whole? Do enough people know how influential Jewish philanthropists have been on American affairs of state? Or the saga of the Jewish community’s fight to free Soviet Jewry? Assuredly, for many people in our field the answer is “Yes, of course!” But my sense (anecdotally, not based on data) is that this kind of knowledge and pride could be more widespread.

As Leading Edge, now incorporating JPro and its whole 125+ years of history, works with our partners across the field to explore what the future of the Jewish communal field will look like (and please do join us in May in Baltimore to be part of that conversation!), I hope that our visions for the future will embrace the lessons, legacy, and pride of our shared past.

Top to bottom: Herman Weinheimer, the author's grandfather, excerpt from vol. 1 of The Jewish Social Service Quarterly, published in February, 1925, cover of Journal of Jewish Communal Service Winter/Spring 2011 edition.

In JPro’s predecessors’ journal, Leading Edge's Seth Chalmer found insights into the Jewish communal field’s history and future — plus articles by his grandfather that were new to his family.

What I Learned Reading Decades of Issues of the Journal of Jewish Communal Service

Leading Edge is known for making the Employee Engagement Survey available to the field, and we believe in the tool so we take it ourselves. When we looked at the survey data from our own employees in 2023, one thing stood out: psychological safety was one of our lowest-scoring areas. 

That was a wake-up call. We knew we wanted to address this critical piece of our organizational culture. With support from an SRE Network grant, we got to work — focusing on what drives psychological safety, like building a stronger sense of belonging and improving how we give and receive feedback. Our goal? To tackle this challenge with a holistic and equitable approach, so every team member feels supported, valued, and able to thrive.

Choosing the right partner for this work was important. We had just wrapped up a year-long DEI process with Frontline Solutions, and we knew we could trust them to guide us through sensitive, meaningful work like this. They understand Leading Edge’s culture inside and out, and their focus on equity, cultural sensitivity, and power dynamics made them the perfect fit. Returning to a partner we already knew and trusted allowed us to hit the ground running and approach the challenge of fostering psychological safety in a seamless and thoughtful way.

At Leading Edge, we believe we can’t help others build better workplaces unless we’re living it ourselves. Three of our core values — Integrity/Yosher, Belonging/Shayyakhut, and Curiosity/Sakranut — center on open communication, inclusion, and a commitment to growth. Feedback is at the heart of all of this. It’s what allows our team to take risks, share ideas, and own mistakes without worrying about judgment. This initiative was a step to ensure we were aligned in our vision: to create a workplace where psychological safety doesn’t just exist — it thrives.

Goals and Structure of the Feedback Workshops

Model thoughtful, supportive conversations around feedback.

Help staff build confidence in giving and receiving feedback at every level of the organization.

Integrate feedback into our performance management process, offering real-time support during key milestones.

The six-session series was all about meeting people where they were:

Adaptive: Adjusted to fit the changing needs of our team and the organization.

Iterative: Built session by session, gradually strengthening skills and shifting our culture over time.

Interactive: Filled with hands-on exercises where staff could practice and grow their feedback skills together.

To build trust and accountability, participants worked with the same partner throughout most of the series. Special sessions were also held for the executive team and supervisors, recognizing the key role they play in shaping a strong feedback culture.

Understanding the difference between feedback and input

Using tools like the Management Center’s Modes of Decision-Making framework

Practicing real-life feedback scenarios through interactive exercises

Frontline Solutions helped us build a shared understanding and awareness around feedback, and the impact was clear. Between August and October 2024, we saw big shifts in how comfortable our team felt giving and receiving feedback:

The percentage of staff giving feedback to supervisors jumped from 30% to 57%.

Comfort with giving feedback to leadership grew from 40% to 66%.

Ratings for open and honest two-way communication doubled, from 30% to 60%.

The workshops focused on practical tools — like being clear, prepared, and following up — that make feedback more effective. People walked away feeling more confident and willing to engage. As one staff member put it, “I feel more confident initiating feedback conversations, knowing there’s a shared understanding of purpose and process.”

At Leading Edge, we’ve started weaving what we learned in the workshops into our day-to-day practices. Here’s what that looks like:

Using a “modes of decision-making” tool in meetings to clarify expectations and make it clear when input is or isn’t needed.

“Closing the loop” on feedback by sharing outcomes and next steps so everyone knows where things stand.

Embracing a “clear is kind” mindset to set realistic expectations and healthy boundaries around feedback.

An anonymous feedback form for folks to share questions, reactions and input. It is pinned to our operations slack channel for ease of use. 

The impact has been real. Communication dynamics have noticeably improved — our executive team now shares more timely, specific updates, and there’s been a big increase in upward communication, helping us create a more inclusive and connected environment. We’ve also refined our performance management processes to encourage feedback not just from managers, but from peers and across the organization.

At Leading Edge, we see feedback as a muscle — it gets stronger with consistent practice and effort. Here’s how we’re planning to keep the momentum going: 

Refining our feedback systems and making them a natural part of our day-to-day workflows.

Creating more opportunities for peer-to-peer and post-project feedback to boost collaboration and learning.

We’ll track our progress using Employee Experience Survey data, focusing on areas like communication, psychological safety, and trust. To keep this work moving forward, we’ll combine structural changes with consistent training to make sure the improvements stick.

For other organizations thinking about doing something similar, here’s what we’ve learned: feedback work is tough. It’s messy, nuanced, and sometimes uncomfortable — but it’s absolutely worth it. Different people bring different experiences and expectations to the table, so it takes humility, empathy, and persistence to get it right.

At the end of the day, building a culture of feedback is an investment in your organization’s long-term health. By staying true to our values and leaning into discomfort, we’re showing that real, lasting change begins from within.

Written by our Senior Director, People and Culture, this article is part of a series featuring perspectives from employees at various levels of Leading Edge, reflecting on our experiences with a feedback workshop series.

Turning Feedback into Fuel: How Leading Edge is Using Honest Conversations as an Opportunity for Organizational Growth

Combined organization to drive a bold, comprehensive vision for talent, leadership, and culture in the Jewish community 

JPro25 in partnership with Jewish Federations – conference on May 5-7, 2025 in Baltimore – to showcase the power of the combined organization 

As of January 1, 2025, Leading Edge and JPro are coming together to support, engage, and develop leaders and professionals throughout the Jewish nonprofit sector. Together, the combined organization will create a central address for the people who lead, work and serve the North American Jewish community, empowering them to deepen their impact at a critical time for the Jewish community. 

JPro has educated and connected Jewish communal professionals for generations, while Leading Edge, founded in 2015, has been a premier voice on leadership and culture, grounded in innovative data from the field. Leading Edge has focused on developing top executives, HR leaders, and Board members. United, they will transform the quality and impact of leaders and professionals across the Jewish world – holistically. 

“This combination will bring unprecedented vision, unity, clarity, and capacity to serving professionals and leaders throughout the North American Jewish nonprofit sector,” says Gali Cooks, President & CEO of Leading Edge. “As we face new challenges in the post-October-7th world, our Jewish ecosystem must invest in our most valuable resource — our people. In this exciting next step, we will create a ‘whole-system’ approach to making Jewish organizations more effective so that our community and the world thrive. With less redundancy and more strategic alignment, we can grow and drive change together in ways we couldn’t do apart.” 

“JPro has been part of North American Jewish history for over 120 years,” says Ilana Aisen, CEO of JPro since 2016 and now Chief Community Impact Officer at Leading Edge. “The development of Jewish life in North America is unique in Jewish history and intertwined with the development of the modern state of Israel and global Jewry, with Jewish communal institutions and their professional and lay leaders at its core. We must prioritize excellence in the recruitment, development, and retention of the people who lead, run, and operate our communal organizations. At this moment of history in particular, I couldn’t be prouder for JPro to join Leading Edge.”

“Leading Edge and JPro coming together holds great promise for the Jewish communal world,” says Eric Fingerhut, President and CEO of Jewish Federations of North America. “At Jewish Federations of North America, we believe that communities only flourish when all organizations, schools, and synagogues have best-in-class professionals and lay leaders. We’ve been proud of our partnerships with JPro and Leading Edge to achieve this and look forward to the future.”

“This new partnership between JPro and Leading Edge will usher in a new era of professional excellence within the Jewish nonprofit world,” says Erika B. Rudin-Luria, JPro’s former Board Chair and now Board Vice Chair at Leading Edge. “The combination of JPro and Leading Edge will enable us to exponentially grow our reach and impact on the professionals and volunteers whom we serve.”

“It all comes down to people,” says Daryl Messinger, Board Chair of Leading Edge. “As a lay leader who has served on over 10 Boards, I’ve seen how vital it is for organizations to invest in talent and leadership. With Leading Edge and JPro coming together, we have a broader and stronger mandate to make this a norm in the field.”

Jewish communal professionals, leaders, Board members, funders, and other stakeholders can learn more about the future of Leading Edge + JPro, and the future of the Jewish nonprofit sector, at the conference JPro25 in partnership with Jewish Federations, taking place in Baltimore May 5-7, 2025. Learn more at jpro25.org. 

JPro began in 1899 as The National Conference of Jewish Charities and cycled through many names and iterations over the century and more that followed. JPro’s mission is to inspire, educate, connect, and empower Jewish communal professionals. The “JPro” name dates to 2014, and since then, JPro has grown impressively in both its reach and its programming, with 13,000 members at 289 affiliate organizations. 

Leading Edge was founded in 2015 with a primary focus on top leaders and the leadership pipeline. Over the last decade, Leading Edge surveys have reached over 53,000 employees at Jewish nonprofits, and its leadership development programs have trained nearly 600 executive and Board leaders at Jewish organizations. In 2022, Leading Edge acquired Boardified (best known for its Board Member Institute), incorporating Board leadership development into its mission in recognition of the importance of the Board-professional partnership. 

Leading Edge, with Boardified and now JPro integrated, will become the only field-wide organization working on recruiting, engaging, and developing the Jewish nonprofit sector’s employees, executive leaders, and Board members. All previously planned JPro and Leading Edge programming for 2025 is expected to continue as planned.

Combined organization to drive a bold, comprehensive vision for talent, leadership, and culture in the Jewish community

Leading Edge and JPro Unite

News and Ideas | Leading Edge

News & Ideas

As we step into 2025, the end of the year offers a moment to reflect on the journeys and milestones of 2024. This year has been one of profound challenges, but also incredible resilience and collaboration across the Jewish nonprofit sector. Through it all, your engagement, partnership, and dedication have been the driving force behind everything Leading Edge has achieved.

We invite you to explore our 2024 Year in Review, where we highlight the progress and impact we’ve made together over the past year. From resources for Board members and a new program for talent professionals to hosting an in-person gathering for program alums, we’re proud to share what we accomplished this year. Thank you for being part of this extraordinary field and its impact on the world.

Read about what we've done together in 2024.

Leading Edge Year in Review 2024

Research: Performance Reviews That Actually Motivate Employees

As organizations move away from traditional number-based performance reviews, many are experimenting with narrative feedback or a mix of the two. But how do employees actually perceive these formats? New research sheds light on what makes feedback feel fair, motivating, and actionable, offering valuable insights for organizations looking to refine their performance evaluation practices.

10% Happier Podcast: If You’re Stressed, Anxious, Or Depressed, This Is Your Counterintuitive Medicine

Ragan: Internal Communications Trends for Success in 2025

HBR: Your Employees Are Also Caregivers. Here’s How to Support Them.

Gallup: Employee Upskilling Is Vital in Rapidly Evolving Job Market

NonprofitPRO: Your Strategic Plan Is Likely Not as Strategic as You Think

HBR: When Expressing Gratitude to Employees, Timing Matters

NonprofitPRO: Study: Board Directors Balance Innovation, Risk Management Amid Financial Pressures

BoardSource: Reimagining Boards for High Impact 

MIT SMR: C-Suite Hiring: Seven Mistakes Companies Still Make

What We're Learning | Leading Edge

The need for leadership development, especially for new executives, has never been clearer. Organizations face significant new challenges, persistent old issues, and sometimes divided constituencies. Yet we know that great leadership in Jewish nonprofits can unlock new potential for organizations to achieve their missions.  

Against that backdrop, Leading Edge is excited to announce the fifth cohort of Leading Executives. These leaders represent a diverse range of backgrounds and organizations. From December through June, they will learn dynamic leadership practices to help them navigate this time, receive constructive personalized feedback to speed and deepen their growth, and connect with a cohort of peer leaders for mutual support long after the formal program is complete.  

The following leaders will participate in the fifth cohort of Leading Executives:

Leading Edge’s research into the experience of Jewish nonprofit executives  shows that connections with other leaders in the Jewish nonprofit sector is the single most agreed-upon form of support that leaders find valuable to them in their roles. For today’s executives, the value of a supportive peer group is higher than ever before. Recent participants have shared that the program contributed to their understanding of their roles as leaders and their responsibility for their teams, helped them learn and continuously improve, and increased their conflict resolution and communication skills. 

Are you interested in future cohorts of Leading Executives, or do you know someone who should be? Don’t miss information about future cohorts when it becomes available; sign up for the interest list for Leading Executives here and for Leading Edge’s newsletter at leadingedge.org/contact-us/.

Meet the next Jewish nonprofit leaders in the next cohort of Leading Edge’s acclaimed executive leadership development program.

Leading Edge announces fifth “Leading Executives” cohort

Executives

The partnership between Board members and professional staff is a keystone of organizational impact. Yet few targeted development opportunities exist for staff members who want to level up their work with their Boards. Leading Edge is launching a pilot program to support executives and other senior leaders in leveling up the professional-Board collaboration.

Built on the best insights from our executive programs, Leadership Lab: Collaborating With Your Board is a cohort-based development program. Participants are senior executives and other senior leaders in their organizations. From November 2024 through April 2025, cohort members will master leadership practices toward effectively partnering with their Boards, analyze successful governance practices, reflect in individual and small group coaching, and develop an implementation plan to improve the efficacy and engagement of their Boards. 

The following leaders will participate in the inaugural cohort of Leadership Lab:

Leading Edge’s research into CEO perceptions of Board performance highlights the importance of successful staff-Board partnerships, and also the urgency to give our professionals more robust tools to deepen the engagement of their Board members. And we know from previous executive programs that the value of peer learning is crucial for high-performing professionals.

Meet the Jewish nonprofit professionals in Leading Edge’s pilot program for professionals who work with ​Boards.

Announcing the first cohort of Leadership Lab: Collaborating With Your Board

Leadership

Writing for eJP, Laura Herman and Deirdre Munley of JPro share how they introduced chavruta-based supervision within their organization, creating a model focused on curiosity, trust, and mutual respect. Bringing the centuries-old Jewish tradition of paired learning into their supervisor-supervisee relationship opened up new ways to deepen professional conversations and build meaningful partnerships. The chavruta model, adaptable to both Jewish and secular texts, can provide workplace pairs a structured way to enhance relationships while exploring professional growth together.

MIT SMR: Manage Boundaries Better With Your Team

Gallup: Managers Feel More Connected to Their Organization's Culture

Greater Good: Why Play at Work Can Inspire Employees to Take Risks

MIT SMR: Building Mastery: What Leaders Do That Helps — or Impedes

HBR: What the Best Leadership Teams Do Right

First Round Review: Radical Candor — The Surprising Secret to Being a Good Boss

HBR: Boards Need a New Approach to Technology

NonProfitPRO: Managing the Relational Aspect of Nonprofit Governance

Candid: Strong boards make strong nonprofits: What you need to know

Writing in eJewish Philanthropy, Laura Herman and Deirdre Munley (then at JPro, now part of Leading Edge) write about using paired Jewish text learning within their supervisory relationship.

“Much has been written about the power of chavruta, paired learning centered on Jewish texts. Chavruta is a form of dialogue, between the study partners and with the text itself. Its virtues have been extolled in commentary dating back to the Talmud… In our experience, using chavruta within our supervisor/direct report relationship has opened up new ways for us to relate to one another and engage with deep, complex topics.”

Reimagining supervision through chavruta

Looking back and looking ahead: Lessons from a year of crises

Writing for eJewishPhilanthropy, Rachel Garbow Monroe (President & CEO of The Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Foundation and past Leading Edge Board Chair) reflects on a tumultuous year for Jewish and global communities and highlights key strategies for effective philanthropy during times of crisis. Looking to the future with hope, she invites funders and leaders to actively listen to both grantees and staff, embrace learning and growing, and to lead with kindness as all those in the sector continue the important work of striving to make the world a better place.

Chronicle of Philanthropy: Show How Your Nonprofit Is Making a Difference: 10 Dos and Don’ts

Journal of Management Studies: Not the Time to be Humble! When and Why Leader Humility Enhances and Deteriorates Evaluations on Leader Effectiveness and Satisfaction with Leader

Culture First (podcast): Seth Godin on building a culture of impact

SSIR: Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast. So Make Culture Your Focus.

SHRM: How to Model Civility for a Better Workplace Culture

AIHR: 9 Box Grid: A Practitioner’s Guide [FREE Template for Talent Management]

The Chronicle of Philanthropy: Can Elections Ever Be Normal Again? These 22 Nonprofit Leaders Have a Plan.

Joan Garry Consulting: A Seat at the Table: Why (Some) Staff Should Be Present At Board Meetings

SSIR: The Three-Legged Stool of Readiness-Centered Founder Transitions

Meet Shana Erenberg, co-founder and CEO of Libenu. Shana is an alum of the Board Member Institute, which was the reimagined signature program of Boardified (powered by Leading Edge) and the premier volunteer leadership development program for board members of Jewish communal organizations. Shana shares her perspective on navigating current challenges with empathy, passion, and determination, and reflects on how her Leading Edge experience has shaped her views on the future of Jewish nonprofit leadership.

Alumni Spotlight conversations may be edited and condensed.

Meet Shana Erenberg, CEO of Libenu. Shana is an alum of the Board Member Institute, which was the reimagined signature program of Boardified (powered by Leading Edge) and the premier volunteer leadership development program for board members of Jewish communal organizations.