Assembly works closely with organizations and communities that are ready to build their capacity for innovation. Today we are spotlighting our wonderful partners at PJ Library, which sends free high-quality Jewish children’s books to families every month.
We work with PJ Library to help them achieve:
- Deepened commitment from local ecosystem leaders to grow PJ Library’s reach and to engage families in Jewish life in deeper, stickier, and more creative ways.
- A cohesive set of ideas, practices, and strategies articulated for PJ Library’s local engagement approach, drawing from PJL’s experience and expertise as well as Assembly’s ideas and methods.
- Inspiration to ground their work even more deeply in Jewish wisdom, tradition, and values.
To accomplish this, our team:
- Designs and facilitates a monthly, virtual Community of Practice experience called Yodea (which in Hebrew means “one who knows”). Yodea gathers senior leaders who steer the vision for engaging Jewish families in their local community, supervise PJ Library in their community, and consider themselves seasoned professionals.
- Creates custom content in collaboration with the PJL team to further develop and codify PJ Library’s Relationship Based Engagement methods and practices.
- Works closely with the PJ Library Engagement Team, who are the in-house support and mentorship to local communities, offering quarterly sessions with Assembly faculty.
“We are in the second year of a deepening relationship with Assembly to advance and enrich the critical work PJ Library is doing to champion local community-building efforts across North America, and help strengthen the way our partner organizations in the field approach family engagement. Assembly has partnered with us to design, develop, and deliver cutting-edge training, communities of practice, and deep Jewish learning to a growing cohort of our local partners, and supported our internal engagement team with robust professional development.”—Jessica Emerson McCormick, Director of Family Experience, PJ Library
Here are three ingredients that make this partnership successful:
- Our interests and methods are aligned. The PJ Library and Assembly teams share significant overlap in our areas of interest. Each of our organizations are committed to (1) Relational Engagement, (2) Jewish Learning, and (3) Community Building. Moreover, we have a shared set of methods. PJ Library is uniquely adept at building a thick culture among those who volunteer and lead. At Assembly, we also use a deep approach to build the identity and purpose of a group, and so our partners at PJ Library “get us.”
- We are mutually concerned not just with Ends but with Means. Both Assembly and PJ Library see this partnership as a part of something greater rather than just the product itself. We both want to see increased family engagement and are committed to the building and strengthening Jewish communities (rather than “just more PJ Library subscriptions.”
- We are integrated into the organization’s work at many levels. PJ Library is a global organization reaching over 670K subscribers. While we at Assembly could easily deliver a one-off program or training, we have been able to work closely with our partners to interact with many different parts of the organization, so that we can help support PJ Library in integrating their high-level relational engagement approach across many teams and audiences, including the Engagement Team, the Yodea cohort itself, and attendees at the annual PJ Library conference.
“WOW WOW WOW – that was such a good session. Thank you so much for the learning that was applicable to…everything I do!”
—Shauna Leavey, Director of Community Engagement at the Jewish Federation of Howard County
We don’t just build new communities, we help strengthen and grow existing communities. If your organization could use new skills, strategies, and tools to go from coffee dates to deep community — let’s connect.