Jews for Jesus

Eight years at Jews for Jesus — four as a missionary running international programs, four as a department director. Almost everything I am useful for now as a lead I learned here rather than at a keyboard.

Missionary, 2008–2012

Based in San Francisco, with work in New York, Tel Aviv, and Delhi.

Each summer I led a ten-week training program and outreach in Israel and India for a team of fifteen to twenty-four people. That meant owning the whole thing: coordinating logistics across continents, scheduling the trips, interfacing with local contacts in each country, and writing and teaching the curriculum.

It also meant owning the inputs. I assembled the leadership team, recruited the participants each year, raised the funds — speaking in churches and building relationships with foundations — and did the follow-up with people who had been through the program in previous years. A program that has to be re-staffed, re-funded, and re-filled annually teaches you quickly that a plan without a recruiting pipeline and a budget behind it is a wish.

The rest of the year went to local work in San Francisco: planning and running events, speaking in churches on the Jewish roots of the Christian faith, and a steady stream of projects.

Running a team of twenty young adults through ten weeks in unfamiliar countries, where the days are long and the work is emotionally taxing, is the most concentrated leadership education I can imagine. You cannot manage that group by authority. You manage it by being clear, being present, and being the person who has already thought about what happens when it goes wrong.

Director of Recruitment and Strategic Advancement, 2012–2016

I was responsible for staff and volunteer recruitment, volunteer training and coordination, volunteer fundraising, cultivating musicians, and producing music albums.

I directly supervised our director of music, our international volunteer coordinator, the San Francisco young adult ministry coordinator, and several administrative staff, and managed a roughly $500,000 annual budget for my department.

I worked closely with the organization's C-level executives to streamline processes, implement change, and expand the work into new territories, and served as strategic advisor to the executive director. Being the person a chief executive thinks out loud with is a particular skill: it requires having an actual opinion, being willing to disagree, and then committing to whatever gets decided.

Nights and weekends

This is also the period the side work came from. The consulting for Jonesen, The Upgraded Web, and most of the identity work all happened here — the part of me that builds things did not go quiet, it just moved to nights and weekends until it was ready to come back full time.