LearnHub

Ok, I just got back from Limmud UK last week and I have a profoundly new appreciation for what they’ve done in terms of building volunteer culture and active participation on the part of community members. Over there, everyone is invited to volunteer, even a few minutes or an hour onsite. They do daily volunteer drives to get people to help with tasks around the conference and they have all kinds of opportunities posted for people to help with the planning of future conferences. For example, you can sign up to volunteer five minutes a week, or ten minutes, or an hour a week, depending on your availability. Everyone pays to attend and pretty much everyone ends up volunteering! It’s an incredible community of willing participants, who all take ownership of the whole experience. The only people who pay less than full price are people who come on “working” scholarships, and those people are requested to put in more volunteer service (e.g., an allotment of three or four hours a day). Their roles are pre-determined, not as spontaneous, but it’s a great way for people who can’t afford the full price to come to conference. As we move toward a multi-day conference in Toronto, I think we should really rethink the subsidy culture we’re creating here for volunteers—it’s an amazing thing to see all these people putting their time and money into a collective community-building project. I’m all for it!!!

Having said that, we can still develop scholarship programs for streams of volunteers. For example, in England, they use the YAD volunteers, a group of young adults who do service work, for about four hours a day. We could consider working with other community groups, like Hillel or UJA Impact (Young Adult Division), to develop special tracks for their constituents to participate in our conference in a meaningful, short-term capacity.

Um, it might also help to look at hobby-based conferences, like this one for podcasters in Kingston: http://www.podcastersacrossborders.com/

I’m hoping we can grow the website so that it becomes a thriving learning community. Whether that means using the learnhub technology for lessons/discussions, or coming at it some other way, I really hope it becomes an ongoing space for community interaction and education.

I was also hoping to be able to offer little podcasts (audio or video streaming) online, featuring snippets of presentations from the festival, or featuring behind-the-scenes clips with festival presenters. There’s a lovely lady, Anne Dublin, who is a writer and a podcaster, who can help us out with these things. Sometimes she submits podcasts to The Book of Life, based in Florida: http://www.jewishbooks.blogspot.com/

I also hope we can use the Limmud website or this learnhub to showcase our community’s talents. For example, Laya Crust, one of our presenters, was telling me last night that she’s part of a project called Women of the Book, which features 54 female artists each depicting a different parashah in pictorial form, and whose work will be bound together like a Torah, to be rolled out on parchment. Sounds exciting!

I don’t know if there’s a space on this community to add links. But I think one of the things we should be doing is looking at comparable retreats in other places—how do they work? how many people do they attract? what do they charge? how long do they last?

To which end, I offer some possible models:

http://isabellafreedman.org/—the Isabella Freedman Jewish Retreat centre, which runs retreats with a spirituality, meditation, and educational focus, even sometimes arts focus, out of New York state

www.kolel.org—our own local Toronto Kolel, run by Elyse Goldstein (great Limmud supporter), which now runs educational trips, many of which are pretty high-end

I’ll keep adding more as they come to me. Please do the same.

That’s a fantastic question, Dave! I don’t want to be the first to reply again, though. I hope others will start to unravel the pieces of this question soon.

I hate to be the first one to post, because as the Conference Chair it may appear that I’m trying to be coercive about this. (smile) I know a lot of people sign up as volunteers for festivals and special events so that they can come for a discounted (or often free) admission. Heck, that’s how I personally afford a bunch of entertainments around town! However, all around the globe, Limmud organizations ask for both time and money from their volunteers. This is in part because these are entirely volunteer-run organizations: we rely on a large community of people who are willing to give of their time to make the event possible, and who ultimately come to feel a keen sense of ownership over the festival. But time alone doesn’t cover the cost of the venue, lunch, etc., so people still need to contribute money for their participation.

How does that sit with other people?