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Community building is key to Jindas’s work philosophy. Guided by the VI team, we learned to integrate this practice into our organization. Their expertise, empathy, and professionalism empowered us to drive positive change. It has made all the difference!

As CEO of the Community Centers Association, we made community building our primary goal. As a result, we implemented a new language, training, roles, metrics, and work plan transforming our organization from top to bottom and bringing significant progress and change to our community centers.

For over a decade, the Israeli organization Tevel b’Tzedek has been consulting with Dr. Sara Shadmi of the Varda Institute to address extreme poverty in Nepal, Burundi and Zambia. While we understood the importance of community work in transforming villages, Dr. Shadmi’s brilliant, articulate, and passionate guidance elevated our efforts. She clearly conceptualized the work and demonstrated its real-life application, opening new worlds for our team.

VI led an outstanding workshop! As part of exploring Jewish life today, participants reimagined community and left the session with clear steps to start redesigning their community life.. The workshop was inspiring and thought-provoking, raising fundamental questions about communal life. Exactly what we needed for our Leadership Training program at the Cohen Leadership initiative.

Working with the Varda Institute felt perfectly timed and aligned. The role of the Israeli department at the World Zionist Organization demands requires both a broad perspective and meticulous attention to detail. Through collaboration with the VI team, we built a genuine partnership, equipping our community leaders with practical professional tools and achieving our objectives in a dynamic and effective manner.

The process we, at the Edmond de Rothschild  Center, led with the Varda Institute, helped us understand the significance and role of our alumni group.

We discussed how we can help the alums understand that they are a community (or perhaps a network) and that this framework is relevant to continuing their career development. The meetings with VI helped us better define our goals and how we can utilize the alums assets to reach our goals.

Maia Tchetchik Sharir and the Varda Institute team have been essential partners to helping Jewish Community Centers create a thriving, safe, equity, and inclusive staff and community cultures by providing the tools and perspectives to foster a culture of belonging among Teams and those they serve. Their 10 principles of belonging and related materials are accessible and clear, and their kindness and professionalism when co-planning and facilitating learning sessions for JCC professionals have been delightful, engaging, and well-received. We look forward to continued collaboration.

As the Jewish Federation of Greater Washington succeeded in bringing new leaders from diverse backgrounds into leadership roles, we were committed to creating an environment that enables meaningful participation. We convened a Culture of Belonging Change Team and partnered with the Varda Institute’s consulting team that is at the forefront of this work across the Jewish community, who took us through a methodology for structuring organizations to generate a sense of belonging, commitment, and shared purpose. Under their guidance we developed a series of interventions that we implemented throughout the year and the “belonging indicators” significantly increased across the board!

In 2016, under the leadership of the Jewish Community Federation, I began a partnership with Sarale and Varda to bring the powerful community-building framework to San Francisco Bay Area Jewish organizations. As our network of community builders grew, they experimented with new principles and tools that transformed transactional agencies into thriving hubs of belonging and community. Eight years later, many Bay Area leaders and institutions have embedded the language and practices of community building into their daily lives, and our Jewish community has never been the same!