WexCoComm

Wexner Professional Fellowship Community Coordinating Committee

What is WexCoComm?

Wex-Co-Comm is a fellow/alumni led committee operating in partnership with the Foundation that is dedicated to strengthening the Wexner Professional Leadership  (WGF + WFF) community of fellows and alumni.

WexCoComm meets every other month, including in-person twice a year.   WexCoComm was founded in 2013 with the initial goal of strengthening relationships among Wexner community members.  It has also served as a thought-partner with Foundation staff, providing fellow/alumni perspective on pressing community issues.

There are about 12 committee members; we try to ensure that membership reflects the broad diversity of our community across fellowship class, career area, denomination (or lack thereof) and region, seeking to ensure a multiplicity of perspectives.

Committee members are unelected volunteers who are committed to the goals of WexCoComm and willing to invest of themselves to advance those goals.

Goals

WexCoComm seeks to welcome, bring and keep fellows and alumni connected to the Wexner community and to catalyze connections between community members in ways that are driven by community members.

Through bimonthly meetings (including twice a year in-person) and ongoing effort on the part of committee members, WexCoComm focuses on creating or facilitating opportunities to come together and act in community as professionals and as people. WexCoComm serves as thought partners with the WGF/WFF professionals when asked, especially when it comes to emerging challenges like sustaining what has become a multi-generational community with members in a variety of relations of power toward one another or as some members of our community move toward retirement. WexCoComm has also convened and facilitated intra-community conversations in response to challenges within our community.

Broadly construed, WexCoComm seeks to identify personal and professional needs within our community and to facilitate ways to meet them and create and convene venues and contexts that enable community members to come together to learn with and from one another.  WexCoComm engages in this work because we firmly believe that the more interpersonal connections and support, we have around Wexner, the more we will learn from each other and the more we will work together outside of Wexner spaces to strengthen Jewish life more generally.

Opportunities

WGF and WFF alumni and current fellows are invited to participate in WexCoComm offerings, which are typically publicized on Wexnet. (We’re currently working on additional ways of getting the word out.)

Recent and current WexCoComm initiatives include:

Adaptive Leadership Peer Case Consultation Groups – Cohorts of 6 alumni who commit to meeting once a month for six months for peer consultation. Each member of the group presents once and serves as a consultant on the remainder of the meetings/calls.

Personal Support Groups – Connecting community members who share similar parenting, elder-care or other circumstances for support and resource-sharing.

Local get-togethers – Coordinating local or regional in-person gatherings of WGF/WFF fellows and alumni.

“How We Lead” – An ongoing series of online conversations, each one with a small group of trusted WGF/WFF colleagues, in which presenters reflect on their own leadership trajectories.

“Humans of Wexner” – Spotlighting and informally introducing individual members of the community, helping the community feel a bit smaller.

 

Professional Skills Workshops – A series of online workshops in which a community member with particular expertise led a professional development workshop for community members.

New Alumni Wexner Welcome – Connecting individual members of the “graduating” fellowship class with veteran alumni.

Alumni Institute Sessions – Sharing WexCoComm opportunities and initiatives, learning about ways to support community members professionally and personally.

Wexner Havruta Learning Project – Connecting alumni and fellows in curated pairs for time-bound or ongoing Jewish study.

Wexner Book Club (in formation) – An opportunity for community members to read and discuss works of current interest.

As we update this website in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic, WexCoComm members and Wexner community members alike have largely turned to focus on immediate needs.

We are eager to shift from being hunkered down in crisis mode to moving toward creating a new normal.  As we do so, WexCoComm looks forward to supporting community members and strengthening the community as we respond to the new challenges with which we are confronted through existing initiatives as well as through new ones that emerge in response to the needs of our changed reality.

WexCoComm Members (As of March 2022)

  • Andy Koren (1), co-chair
  • Rebecca Rosenthal (16), co-chair
  • Naomi Adland (25)
  • Mollie Feldman (29)
  • Daniel Kirzane (21)
  • Sari Laufer (14)
  • Chaviva Levin (5)
  • Josh Satok (28)
  • Jon Spira-Savett (3)
  • Melissa Werbow (12)
  • David Wolkenfeld (17)

If you have thoughts about how you, together with WexCoComm, can help connect and strengthen this community please be in touch.

Contact

Andy Koren (1), co-chair

Rebecca Rosenthal (16), co-chair