Here are stories from just a few of the many Avodahniks organizing to build worker power and a more just United States.
We are now accepting applications for the 2025-2026 service year. Start your application or scroll down to continue learning about the impact our Corps Members have on their communities.
We help young leaders start their Jewish justice journeys. Corps Members live and learn together in intentional communal homes in Chicago, New Orleans, New York, and Washington, DC. While they deepen their social justice framework through experiential programming and values-driven community building, Corps Members serve directly at local organizations tackling crucial social and economic justice issues.
Corps Members graduate with a year of meaningful, on-the-ground job experience and robust professional and personal development, joining our active 1,600+ alumni network of Jewish social justice professionals and activists who will continue to support their future careers and serve as their Jewish community for life.
Home-cooked Shabbat dinners, late-night conversations, and holiday celebrations make living in the bayit (communal home) memorable and meaningful. Co-create an intentional, pluralistic community that helps you envision and embody how the world could be.
After matching with a placement organization, you’ll contribute meaningfully to on-the-ground efforts on crucial justice issues such as the criminal legal system, immigration, housing and food insecurity, education, and healthcare.
Explore how you want to live out your justice values, the role of community in creating a more just world, and what role your Jewish identity plays in your life and work. Our dynamic programming will deepen and contextualize your day-to-day work while supporting you in finding your place in broader justice movements.
Avodah takes care of the most important things. Corps Members receive furnished housing, a monthly living stipend, health insurance, an exit stipend, and a travel allowance. Corps Members can also tap into our Economic Access Fund to support unmet financial needs.
Move to a new city (or a familiar one!) with tons of support. Explore free events, local activism, and Jewish life with a built-in group of friends from your cohort. Through your placement, experts, and Avodah staff, receive guidance and professional development that will set you up for workplace success.
Our community of over 1,600 Jewish social justice professionals and activists across the country are there to help with apartment hunts, job references, Shabbat dinner invites, mentorship, and everything in between. Stay connected to Jewish justice opportunities for the long haul.
Corps Members create the foundations for lasting friendships and collaborations by co-creating intentional, pluralistic communities within our program cities.
In each city, Avodah provides a fully furnished communal home known as the bayit (the Hebrew word for house). You won’t have to worry about paying rent and utility bills, or even the challenges that come from trying to do chores and cook meals alone. Instead, you’ll work collectively to form a community where everyone can have their needs met, learn from a diverse set of perspectives, and have their growth pushed in loving ways. Our team is there to provide support on everything from apartment problems to conflict resolution training.
Life within the bayit is both joyous and challenging, meaningful and complicated. The communal home is where you’ll wrestle together with the hard questions of social justice work. It’s also where you’ll share home-cooked meals, make plans to explore the city together, plug into local activism, celebrate Jewish holidays, invest deeply in community care, and prioritize joy. To make it all work, you’ll spend time in orientation and ongoing programming digging deep into community building, anti-oppression training, and pluralism.
Communal living can sometimes be seen as one of the more intimidating components of the program—and yet we hear every year from Corps Members that it turned out to be the most meaningful. After the service year, 50% of our Corps Members continue to live together, and our alumni continue to engage in multiple ways for decades to come.
Corps Members turn their passion into action by serving at local organizations doing critical economic justice work at the community level. At Avodah, we believe in the power and importance of being in deep, authentic relationship with those most impacted by injustice. We know that our work is strongest when rooted in coalition and proximity. Most of our Corps Members engage in direct service, working with clients to meet their immediate needs. Others might engage in community organizing or legal advocacy. Wherever you’re serving, you’ll add significant capacity to your placements’ on-the-ground work, and in turn, gain key work experience and leadership skills.
Your year of service is not only the perfect springboard to a career in the justice field, but a pathway to infusing any career with Jewish social justice values. And while our focus has always been on setting Corps Members up for a lifetime of meaningful, sustainable, and effective social justice work – not saving the world in one service year – it’s undeniable that the contributions of Corps Members to their placements and their impact on the clients they serve are invaluable.
Below are a few examples of the kinds of positions we offer through our placement organizations. We also offer placements working on employment services, food insecurity, gender-based violence, senior services, and more!
Help Jewish community institutions develop action plans addressing the climate crisis at Adamah
Work with a national network of volunteers to advocate for safe food, clean water, and a livable climate at Food & Water Watch
Support tenants facing housing-related legal issues like evictions and violation of tenant rights at Southeast Louisiana Legal Services
Strengthen enforcement of fair housing laws through community outreach, education, and research at Fair Housing Justice Center
Provide legal services to low-income LBGTQ+ immigrants and people with HIV at National Immigrant Justice Center
Lead a community of volunteers in providing mentorship, English language support, improved access to services, community integration, and interpretation/translation to vulnerable immigrants and asylum-seekers at HIAS
Safeguard the legal rights and financial health of DC residents with low incomes dealing with abusive debt collection practices at Tzedek DC
Empower workers in low-wage jobs to exercise their rights related to caregiving and parenting at First Shift Justice Project
Help teen girls find their voice and discover strength through active sports and leadership programs at Girls in the Game
Advise high school students as they embark on their path into adulthood either through college, training programs, and employment at Comprehensive Youth Development
Provide students with vital information regarding their own health and how to advocate for themselves in the healthcare system at Erie Family Health Centers
Improve access to dental healthcare through community education and coordination of mobile dental services at EXCELth, Inc.
Advocate for incarcerated individuals and their families at Promise of Justice Initiative
Help recently incarcerated individuals gain access to housing, employment, and community support at The First 72+
Organize community members through meetings, campaign actions, end education events at Jews United for Justice
Lead events, support campaigns, and create content drawing connections between social justice and Jewish tradition at the Jewish Council for Urban Affairs
“Avodah introduced me to friends and peers who were also committed to studying our shared histories and past struggles for justice, within and beyond Judaism, in a way that enabled us to imagine and actualize vibrant and meaningful futures for ourselves and for others. Together, we cultivated the collective rituals, learnings, and joy needed to support one another, sustain our own work, and hold each other accountable in striving to make those connections between our past and our present every day.”
— DC Service Corps alum
Our programming is designed to contextualize, deepen, and nourish your placement work while strengthening your ability to stay in social justice work for the long haul. You’ll bring your Jewishness and understanding of justice together, equipping you for a future anchored in the intersections of these components of who you are.
Programs take place in the form of facilitator-led learning sessions, anti-oppression training, peer-led issue salons, community care nights, immersive retreats, professional development opportunities, holiday programs, and more.
How do I live out my justice values?
Why is community important to creating a more just and equitable world?
What role does my Jewish identity play in my life and work?
Some programs will help you develop a structural analysis around social injustice. You’ll locate your placement’s work in a broader landscape, examine the connections to different issue areas in your city, interrogate different methods of social change, explore questions of power and positionality, and dive into the intersecting root causes of oppression. And your skill building won’t be siloed to your placement work – you’ll gain critical skills such as fundraising, organizing, program development and facilitation, self-advocacy, conflict resolution, practices for personal and communal reflection, and more.
Other programs will help you develop a relationship to your Jewishness and Jewish community that can be empowering, and sustaining. You’ll learn with rabbis (including our on-staff Ruach Avodah, who is available to provide deep Jewish learning and pastoral care), educators, community leaders, and activists throughout the year to explore Jewish texts, history, pluralism, and justice-oriented approaches to Jewish holidays and ritual. Corps Members create a lasting, pluralistic Jewish community that is deeply and inextricably intertwined with justice values.
• Anti-Racism Training
• Shabbat as a Radical Practice
• How to Have Difficult Conversations: Exploration, Tools, and Practice
• Antisemitism & White Supremacy
• City-specific Issues (i.e. DC Statehood/Voting Rights, Gentrification in New Orleans)
• Regulation Tracking and Tools: Body-Based Approaches to Self Care in Community
• History of Jewish Movements for Change
• Philanthropy, Capitalism, and Change
• Issue Salon on Immigration and Refugee Resettlement
• Community Organizing Training
Jews of Color (JOCs) in Avodah’s Service Corps community can participate in the JOC Bayit, a JOC-specific community-building opportunity where JOC Corps Members can build community, access 1:1 support, explore leadership development, and celebrate their Jewish identity. This flexible, voluntary program evolves to meet the needs of each cohort, and can include communal living, in-person and virtual events, programming opportunities with JOC community leaders, and 1-on-1 mentorship. For the 2025-2026 program year, the JOC Bayit will not include a residential option and will connect JOC Corps Members from across our program cities for virtual and regional community building.
If you have questions about what our JOC Bayit has to offer, reach out to our team at apply@avodah.net to learn more.
When you join Avodah, you join a network of more than 1,600+ Jewish social justice leaders committed to giving back and working toward change. Our network of peers, friends, professional colleagues, and mentors will be there to support you through all phases of your life and career. You’ll have opportunities throughout your service year to learn from alumni in programs, to connect one-on-one on mentorship opportunities, and be in community at local gatherings and holiday celebrations.
Our alumni go on to work in education, social services, public policy, healthcare, law, non-profit management, community organizing, the Jewish communal sphere, and so much more. Some of them — nearly 30%–receive offers to stay at their placement organization after the service year is over.
Alumni also get access to incredible benefits at partner institutions, with access to merit scholarships of $5,000 and waived application fees for eligible programs at Hebrew Union College, and tuition reductions of 15% for online graduate programs (with potential for additional scholarships) at the Hornstein Program at Brandeis University.
Here are stories from just a few of the many Avodahniks organizing to build worker power and a more just United States.
Outgoing Avodah Jewish Service Corps Members to reflect on the impact of their year of service.
Learn how a Service Corps Member found their people and professional purpose through Avodah.
We’re here to help you through the application process and will be available every step of the way, from start to finish. We know that everyone’s background and needs are different, and can answer any questions you may have.
