8000 Walton Parkway, Suite 110
New Albany, Ohio 43054
614 939-6060
Dispatches from the network and updates from the Foundation.
Jan 2016
Reposted with permission from The Ringel Group Blog, A Fresh Perspective We don’t hold meetings on a football field, but great quarterbacks do. Five-time league MVP Peyton Manning of the Denver Broncos can teach us a lot about facilitation. He dedicates extraordinary preparation to his sport, but will shift his team in the moment to make the play. Great facilitators are masterful planners. They work from a playbook, mapping stakeholder
Jan 2016
Many people ask us, “What is the Jewish Funders Network (JFN)?” When people express confusion about something you are so involved in, it comes as a surprise, and a prompt. Since most of us in the Wexner network are very connected to philanthropic giving, the three of us thought we would share what JFN does and why it is strategic. More than twenty years ago, a handful of funders convened to
Dec 2015
Here we are again at New Year’s Eve. Tonight, all around the secular world, we celebrate our last gasp of bacchanal revelry and exuberance for the year. We don gay apparel and stay up late to prove that we still have the stamina of youth. Alternately, we lament that we no longer have the tenacity to stay awake until midnight. At some point, we rejoice in pajamas and the comfort
Very quietly, and with little international attention, one of the most delicate and interesting engineering projects in the Middle East took a big step forward this month: the mutual Jordanian/Israeli Red Sea-Dead Sea Water Project was published to investors for the development and execution of the project’s first phase. The project includes a large desalination plant which will be built in Jordanian Aqaba, near Eilat, and will eventually result in
We’ve completed building our new facility, following a successful multi-million dollar capital campaign for the Ida Crown Jewish Academy, the premier coeducational modern Orthodox high school in the Midwest. As if that weren’t challenging enough, we now turn our attention to the challenge of bringing our educational experience in line with the challenges of the modern world. To adequately inspire our future students, it’s no longer sufficient to educate children in
Dec 2015
After a transformative Wexner experience led me to question my work in the secular world, I “crossed the line” to become a Jewish communal professional in 2002. By 2008, when I became founder/CEO of UpStart, I had been a lay leader on eight boards of directors. During my lay experiences, I had often heard expressions of dissatisfaction with the board experience. Upon becoming a professional, I now heard executive directors
Dec 2015
This past summer, the Boston area vegetarian restaurant chain Clover became certified kosher by Rabbi Barry Dolinger, an Orthodox rabbi in Providence, Rhode Island. A controversy erupted, both because Rabbi Dolinger’s standards differ from many mainstream kashrut-certifying organizations and because a Clover employee mistakenly tweeted that the restaurant was under the supervision of the Rabbinical Council of New England. Often such incidents have a tendency to turn political and nasty.
Dec 2015
For me, leadership, besides making empires rise and fall, is also about being able to communicate with both the dark side and the resistance and hoping the Force will always stay on your side. The Star Wars movies have a great deal of it all: love and trust, continuity, innovation, robust friendships, hard choices and strong female leadership, which reminds us that we all are born Jedi, and definitely capable
Dec 2015
Reprinted with permission from Harry Nelson’s blog “Harry Nelson: Healthcare,Leadership,Strategy.” In every organization, there are moments of crisis when something goes extremely wrong. This December marks the second anniversary of such a time for me personally and for our firm. It was a nerve-racking period, when it looked like a bad turn of events might upend our firm. While it was a stressful time, looking back two years later, it
Dec 2015
Israel has successfully branded itself as a “startup nation” but can it continue being one when only 20% of employees in its high-tech industry are women? Last winter, 40 senior executives from the Israeli civil service took part in the first class of the Wexner Senior Leadership (WSL) Program at the Harvard Kennedy School. Participating in this four-week program was an amazing experience: learning from the best teachers in the