Life in Avodah
Your year in Avodah will be an immersive one—it’s designed to support your holistic growth professionally, personally, spiritually, and communally.
You’ll be working full-time at a placement organization while also engaging in deep learning through regular programming and intentional community building through pluralistic communal living.
Jewish Life
At Avodah, we see justice as a deep-rooted and powerful part of Jewish life, and Jewish life as a valuable source of sustainability, community, wisdom, and meaning in our justice work. Throughout your Jewish Service Corps experience, you’ll develop a deep relationship between your justice and Jewishness, and explore all of the powerful connections between the two.
Communal Living
Life within the bayit (communal home) is both joyous and challenging, meaningful and complicated. This is where you’ll wrestle together with the hard questions of social justice work, learn from a diverse set of perspectives and backgrounds, negotiate creating a community that can contain a diverse set of Jewish practices and observance levels, and move through the inherent conflict that can arise from creating authentic community.
Serving
Avodah provides on-the-ground economic justice organizations with vetted Corps Members who fill much needed entry-level roles at a highly subsidized cost to the placement. By volunteering their time and labor in a role the organization normally could not afford to support, Corps Members add valuable capacity that allows our placement organizations to expand the scope of their work and enhance their impact on the community they are serving.
Learning
Programming provides the systemic analysis, professional development, Jewish social justice insights, and communal networks that will support you in engaging in social justice work effectively and sustainably. Through experiential programs, you’ll dig into different methods of social change, root causes of oppression, the intersections between different issue areas, anti-oppression work, city-based issue areas, and skill-building.
JOC Bayit
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.
Life after Avodah
When you become an alum, you join a 1,700+ network of Jewish social justice leaders all over the country. Alumni have access to a vast array of virtual learning sessions, working groups, and coaching programs.