Sarah’s inspiring thoughts about philanthropy

I joined J.Team because my mom works at The Jewish Federation and told me about it and I became very interested in doing philanthropic things and J.Team was a great way to start out. As a part of every meeting there is a part which incorporates Jewish values, in this meeting we got a long list of values and were told to find the top three that matter the most to us and then were shown how our values could be used to figure out charities that we were more interested in. It was very fascinating to actually figure out what your top three values were from such a huge list, and then to see how you can apply them.

For the meeting we were lucky enough to get a tour around the First Place School which is a "service agency devoted to educating and nurturing children whose families struggle with the risk or reality of homelessness." The First Place School offers education, housing, and support services to help families until they become stable. They do all of this free of charge. When we went to the First Place School , I was truly amazed at how a single place can get all of this done and help so many people without charging money. The First Place School truly inspired me to want to help people in need even more and even made me think of the homeless in a different way than before.

At the end of the session we narrowed a sizable list of charities down to six that we were interested in, although it was a long process, I liked learning about the charities. It made me wonder how with our budget we would be able to help as many charities as we all would like. This was my favorite meeting so far because the First Place School was truly inspiring.