GETTING THERE Challenges, Opportunities, and Outcomes (RootOne 2022 Evaluation Report)

Key Findings:

Background

RootOne was launched in 2020 with the goal of maximizing the number of Jewish teens who participate in an Israel experience and maximizing the impact of those experiences. Since its inception, RootOne has committed itself to developing a robust program of research and evaluation. For 2022, the scope of this endeavor has included: surveys of participants shortly before and after their time in Israel, as well as a year after their return home; a post-trip survey of trip leaders; real-time observation of Early Experiences (pre-trip programming) and on-the-ground, in-person observations during participants’ time in Israel; observations of staff training; content analysis of program itineraries; and interviews with program staff and organizers, North American participants and their parents, and some of the Israeli teens who joined programs. This report synthesizes the data collected during the 2022 calendar year.

Participants’ Profiles

Of the 4,768 young people who received a RootOne voucher and who also responded to a survey, 71% had attended a Jewish overnight camp for at least two summers; 51% had visited Israel previously; and 46% had attended a Jewish day school for at least one year. In addition, 19% came from interfaith homes, 10% identified as a person of color, and 22% as non-heteronormative.

Currently, compared to other young Jews in America, RootOne participants are substantially less diverse demographically and economically, they are much more networked to other young Jews, and also much more likely to have participated in immersive Jewish experiences.

The Needs of Teens are Evolving: Challenges, Rewards, and Opportunities

About a fifth of RootOne survey respondents reported a long-term mental health condition (in line with American national averages), and one-third reported some kind of disability. Observers noted that participants experienced high levels of social anxiety, heightened in the intense social atmosphere of the Israel trip; they witnessed participants struggling to fit in socially or feeling challenged by being surrounded by peers for several weeks. Participants were often overwhelmed, tired, and lacked the energy or drive to maintain engagement through long, heavily programmed days. They struggled with the demanding schedule, and frequently asked for more breaks or downtime; they seemed exhausted throughout various days of observation, regardless of what day it was in the trip. Participants seemed equally tired on the first day of observation as on the last day. Tour guides and trip leaders made several on-the-ground decisions to cancel programs, sites, or experiences at the end of the day, when they determined that the participants would not be able to cope with their demands. Similarly, some programs allowed participants to opt out of experiences if they felt too tired to participate that day.

Program Design Bottlenecks: Further Challenges and Opportunities

Paradoxically, as diverse as program goals are, the programs themselves tend to be constructed from many of the same building blocks: their buses tend to visit many of the same sites, and the great majority draw from a common pool of staff. Analysis of program itineraries shows that, overall, the sites most frequently visited by programs included the Old City of Jerusalem, the Kotel, Yad Vashem, Masada, the City of David, and the Dead Sea—places focused on Israel’s ancient past, its religious significance, Jewish suffering, and the survival of the Jewish People.

Of course, what participants did in these places could vary, as might the stories they heard, depending on whether the tour guide was an employee of the site or a member of the program’s own staff. A visit, for example, to Rachel’s tomb in Bethlehem with an Orthodox group was quite different from a visit to the same place with a religiously and politically progressive group; one program emphasized the opportunity for prayer at a holy Jewish site, the other used the opportunity to unpack the complex issues at a historic Jewish site located inside a Palestinian town.

Generally, a consequence of this kind of itinerary overlap is that participants tend to hear a limited set of narratives about Israel. And because most programs are visiting the same limited number of locations, their tour buses tend to get snarled up in a never-ending series of traffic jams. There are only so many groups that can be admitted to the same menu of sites over the course of the summer season.

Against this backdrop, there is evidence that some of the narratives that participants hear are shifting. Analysis of the sites least frequently visited by programs attests to the specific priorities of different providers, and to organizational agendas outside the consensus. Locations that appeared in just two or three itineraries included the Belz Yeshiva in Jerusalem and the LGBT Open House in Tel Aviv; sites in the West Bank such as Palestinian Bethlehem and the settlement of Shiloh; specific movement- or denomination-oriented sites, such as Kfar Chabad and Kibbutz Hannaton (Conservative); and a handful of Christian, Muslim, and Druze sites.

Helping programs adapt in these ways will be complex work. It will involve modifying long-established models of program design, implementing ways of narrating new and compelling master narratives about Israel, and constructing broad-based and sophisticated professional development for staff so that they are better attuned to their educational and pastoral roles.