Iva Kesselman was a seventh-grader in 1997 at then-Brandeis Hillel Day School in San Francisco when she found out that her father had dreamed up a philanthropy project that would deprive her classmates of bar and bat mitzvah gifts.
The idea was that the 12- and 13-year-olds would pool the money their parents would have spent on gifts for everyone in the class that year — $300 per family. The middle-schoolers would then learn about social justice needs in the community, research nonprofits working in those fields, leverage the original pot of money to raise more, vote on which groups should get how much and, finally, distribute the funds to the organizations.
“I was a little confused. I wondered how the other kids would feel about it,” recalled Kesselman, now a 38-year-old Burlingame resident. “But I’d been raised around philanthropy and nonprofits, and I was acutely aware of the need in the community, and of how much we kids at Brandeis had.”
Any initial hesitations among the class of 33 students quickly dissipated once they plunged into the work, she said.
The students formed the board of directors of what they dubbed the Seventh Grade Fund, and by the end of the two-year pilot project in 1999 distributed $13,000 among seven San Francisco nonprofits working on causes such as domestic violence, Kosovo refugee aid and animal rights. They also sponsored a young man who took part in the AIDS Ride from San Francisco to Los Angeles, who proudly wore a T-shirt emblazoned with the fund’s name.
Their efforts were celebrated in a story in the San Francisco Chronicle, an ABC News segment and coverage in this publication, of course.
Twenty-five years later, the pioneering grant-making initiative now called the Tzedek Program is a permanent part of the seventh-grade curriculum at what has become the Brandeis School of San Francisco.
What is generally believed to be the first such project in the country has spawned an entire field of Jewish youth philanthropy that today involves about 3,000 youths at more than 100 day schools, synagogues, federations, JCCs and summer camps that give more than $1 million in grants every year.
“New programs start all the time,” said Danielle Segal, executive director of Honeycomb, formerly the Jewish Teen Funders Network, the umbrella organization for Jewish youth philanthropy programs.
The fact that so many of the earliest programs like the one at Brandeis still operate is, Segal said, a “testament to how great these models are.”
Brandeis marked the program’s 25th anniversary this past May, bringing some of the original board members, now in their late 30s, to talk to current seventh-graders who were concluding their semester-long effort. Iva Kesselman was among the speakers.
“I told them how amazing and impactful it is. You don’t realize it at 13. You’re dealing with your own stuff, growing, changing. But at the time of your bar or bat mitzvah, what better thing to do than know you can have an impact on other people’s lives,” she recalled.
“That’s something I took with me in life.”
The Seventh Grade Fund emerged at a time when ideas about Jewish youth philanthropy were beginning to float through educational circles.
“Those early pioneers who took a risk on a new format and gave young people the responsibility to give away money were hugely instrumental,” said Segal. “Without them, people wouldn’t have seen the benefit and then the format wouldn’t have been replicated.”
Michael Kesselman, Iva’s father, recalls that he got a lot of pushback at the beginning, especially from parents who didn’t want to deprive their kids of a big blow-out celebration. He met with the wealthy father of one seventh-grader who broke down in tears in front of him. Other parents, who weren’t well-off, weren’t keen to contribute $300.
Still, the project moved ahead. Every child in the class took part, whether or not their families gave money. Kesselman, who at the time worked at the S.F.-based Koret Foundation, also noted that there was nothing preventing parents from giving their children gifts on top of that.
Once the media got hold of the story and then-first lady Hillary Clinton wrote a congratulatory letter, other Bay Area Jewish institutions began to create similar programs.
According to Honeycomb, the Gideon Hausner Jewish Day School in Palo Alto was first to follow, in 1999, followed closely by the b’nai mitzvah program at Temple Isaiah in Lafayette. Today, in addition to these three early ones, there are teen philanthropy programs at Brandeis Marin in San Rafael, Yavneh Day School in Los Gatos and the Ronald C. Wornick Jewish Day School in Foster City, as well as ones for older teens at the Contra Costa Midrasha and the S.F.-based Jewish Community Federation and Endowment Fund.
San Francisco native Aaron Keyak was 12 when he became an original board member of the Seventh Grade Fund. Today he is deputy special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism at the U.S. State Department.
“It really is the essence of philanthropy. You give a little of what you have for the greater good,” he told J. from his office in D.C. “It was remarkable how seriously the folks contending for our grants took us. They treated us as if we were the Lynn Schusterman Foundation,” he said, referring to the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies, a major Jewish charitable organization.
While the money raised for local nonprofits is important, Keyak said, more significant is what the students learn as they go through the process of discovering community needs and deciding how they can effect change through their philanthropic dollars.
“It planted the seed of giving back in all the kids,” he said. “It afforded us the opportunity to live our Jewish values through tzedakah. It’s not just about saying prayers and going to shul, but about living your Jewish values outside your day school or synagogue or Shabbat table.”
Naturally, over the years the Tzedek Program has evolved. Jody Bloom, a Judaic studies and Hebrew teacher at Brandeis, is in charge of it now. She notes that today’s seventh-graders use more sophisticated tools than the original group, for example, evaluating their organizations’ ratings on GuideStar, which tracks and provides data on nonprofits, to determine how effectively each organization manages its money, and creating short videos on the groups they research to present to their classmates.
But the core remains the same: empowering young teens to understand money, philanthropy, budgets and community needs and to see how it all connects to Jewish values.
In May, Brandeis seventh-graders held their culminating event of the school year, a ceremony where the students spoke about their chosen nonprofits and handed checks over to representatives of each organization, who in turn spoke of how impressed they were with these young philanthropists. This latest class of 40 seventh-graders raised and distributed $30,000 in grants.
“It was really meaningful,” Bloom said.
Eva Barkin, now 13 and in eighth grade, was part of last school year’s Tzedek Program. Her cause was education for the underserved, and she decided to put forward Alive and Free, a San Francisco nonprofit working to end youth violence and give kids who need it a second chance.
“Going to Brandeis we are privileged to get such a marvelous education,” she told J. “If you’re a teen in jail, you can’t get the education you need. Everyone deserves to succeed in life.”
Eva’s father, David Barkin, recalls dropping off his daughter to interview the group’s executive director for the first time.
“She came out of the office incredibly animated from the experience,” he said.
Reflecting on what she took with her from the year, Eva said, “I got to see how many nonprofit organizations there are in San Francisco that don’t get talked about. I learned about them from my peers who researched them and I saw how needed they all are.”
A quarter-century later, the Tzedek Program continues to inspire students and their parents.
Said Eva’s father, “I’m incredibly proud of her.”