After a relaxing Shabbat, it’s time to begin the week!
While I was organizing myself for the upcoming week I came across an email for a FREE Shabbat Dinner with the Professional (Jewish) Leaders Project, yet another interesting Jewish organization that focuses on young Jews, and Taglit-Birthright Israel.
Although I’m going to be back in states for the Shabbat Dinner on August 15th, I didn’t find an event in Seattle. I emailed the coordinators and am trying to organize it myself. If it goes through and you’re part of the Seattle Jew Crew, you should definitely take part. I’ll keep everyone updated here.
Otherwise, I spent a little time on the Professional Leaders Project website. Here are the basics of what I found.
According to PLP’s website:
We are an entrepreneurial nonprofit founded three years ago, and select Talent in their 20s – 30s around the country. PLP connects them to forward-thinking seasoned leaders for networking, mentoring, coaching, skill-building, and positive organizational change. We are dedicated to increasing the recruitment and retention of outstanding leaders who will lead our Jewish community into the future.
Unfortunately, they currently are only providing services and networking to young Jews in the United States. Hopefully in time they will expand their network to include Israel and the rest of the diaspora Jewry. Especially since an increasing number of young American Jews are making connections with Israel and spending a month or more there.
Their website is sleek and well organized. It includes a place to sign up for their weekly newsletter, an RSS feed and badges for users to add their organization to StumbleUpon and Facebook. The site also had a PLP TV page where you could watch videos of their Jewish leaders and their projects. It all looked great, until I wanted to take a part of it. Then I found a bunch of road blocks lying in my path.
PLP offers many different PLP Initiatives, social networking, mentoring and fellowships. I noticed a sign-in box for their Talentshare networking site, but couldn’t find a place to sign-up. I also couldn’t find a place to apply to any of the other Initiatives advertised on the website and ended up feeling like I’d hit a road block.
Instead, I had to drag myself over to their contacts section and sent an email to their info box–which sucks. Instead of all that mess, I think it would really benefit them (and the young Jews that they are serving) to create a place where people could easily apply online and get more information about becoming participants in their organization.
Lastly, the organization was featuring Michelle Citrin, who I wrote about in my previous post. However I could not figure out how she is connected to the organization and why they were featuring her. I suppose that she is one of their Jewish leaders but I’d love to know a little bit more, but again the website failed to do that.
From the PLP’s mission statement, the organization appears to be really dedicated to young Jews. However, if they can’t utilize the internet and their website well, they definitely aren’t going to connect well to us youngsters.
