LEVERAGING LEADERSHIP AND PHILANTHROPY

Our Funding Strategy

Elluminate invests in leaders who are at the forefront of creating social innovation using a gender lens. Through our philanthropy and leadership development, we lift up women as changemakers and nurture their unique needs. We create and cohere a pipeline of brilliant, innovative, entrepreneurial women with big, bold ideas about the world and how to make it better. 

Catalyzing Feminist Change

Elluminate is creating a roadmap for change, anchored by three distinct goals:

• Investment in solutions to intractable social issues devised by women leaders, driven by their Jewish values and a gender lens; and
• Educating women philanthropists to learn about emergent social issues and to leverage their dollars in order to make strategic and intentional investment in change.

Our Approach: Join Us

We support both visionary Jewish women leaders and visionary Jewish women philanthropists. When we say philanthropists, we are talking about those who give with intention – those who can give thousands of dollars and those who can give 25 — together we are activating our potential to create positive change. We introduce philanthropists to leaders who are using their Jewish values and a gender lens to solve intractable problems anywhere in the world. We have created a space where those doing the work on the ground share their successes and challenges and like-minded philanthropists – donors, activists, supporters of any kind – learn about issues relevant to their own desires to make a difference in the world. Join us:

Engage in Participatory Philanthropy: 

Deepen your philanthropic education through a feminist lens. Be part of a community of dynamic women who select which inspirational leaders we will support, called Visionary Circles. This community meets periodically over six months. Our next cycle starts in December! Click here for more information.

Learn From and With Our Visionary Leaders:

Crown JEWEL conversations are monthly virtual up-close conversions with elluminate’s JEWELs: Jewish Entrepreneurial Women Executives and Leaders, women who lead organizations addressing today’s most pressing issues around the world – in and beyond the Jewish community. Get to know, learn from, and interact with these bold and creative leaders!  

Convene: 

Join us for The Convening – our annual summit. Bringing to life the intersection of our work – addressing pressing challenges (this year’s focus is on reproductive justice, addressing gun violence, and humanitarian issues).  

Our Core Values

Gender Lens 

At elluminate, we understand that gender is a social construct and so we do not use a binary approach. As feminist philanthropists we use a gender lens to reveal the ways in which content and approaches are gendered or informed by, shaped by, or biased toward a person’s perspectives or experiences based on gender. As an added layer, we not only use a gender lens in our decision-making, but we also consider leaders to join our cohorts who themselves utilize a gender lens in their leadership. These leaders consider how gender impacts their actions, their participants, and their relationships with colleagues. They understand that people have different experiences based on their gender and thus require different approaches to achieve their best outcomes. We believe that this kind of compassionate philanthropy and leadership will result in better and more productive workplaces and make lasting change for people of all genders around the world.

Advance Social Change

We believe that women have the ability to create long-term, positive change. The social entrepreneurs in our network are solving intractable social problems by creating innovative solutions that will create systemic, enduring change for people of all genders around the world. These leaders are transforming their institutions, communities and the world by reframing issues, changing policies, changing peoples’ behaviors, and increasing engagement.

Through our philanthropic and leadership activities, we are also changing the funder-grantee relationship to one in which we are all sitting around the table together. The network we are creating is unique – for Jewish women social entrepreneurs, leaders, and philanthropists to learn and grow together.

Jewish Values

At elluminate, both our philanthropists and leaders represent a variety of relationships to Jewish life – we believe there is strength in that diversity. What we all have in common is that it is our values which are rooted in Judaism that inspire us in our leadership and philanthropic pursuits. Here are just some of the values that guide us:

• Kehilah – community
• Betzelem Elohim – the infinite worth of human life
• Ta’amod – stand up
• Chesed – loving-kindness
• Achrayut – responsibility
• Tzedek – justice

Diversity, Equity, and Justice: 

We are an intergenerational and diverse community of leaders and philanthropists. We value the broad range of insight, perspectives, and experiences brought by people from diverse backgrounds. We specifically invite the voices of Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and Asian people, LGBTQ+, gender non-conforming individuals, and those with disabilities, who are so often left out of conversations, planning sessions, and participatory activities, and have so much to contribute.

We commit to working with others who share our goals, advocate policies – in both the private and public sectors – that promote diversity, equity, and justice, and challenge systems and policies that uphold inequity, disparity, and oppression. 

Read our board statement on Diversity, Equity, & Justice here.