THE JEWISH WOMEN'S FOUNDATION
of the Greater Palm Beaches

WHO WE ARE 

The Jewish Women’s Foundation of the Greater Palm Beaches (JWF) is dedicated to improving the lives of women and girls through social change grantmaking. Our grants are strategically invested in activities that are designed to challenge and overcome the social, economic, political and legal inequities faced by Jewish women and girls around the world.  
 
The JWF was founded in 2002 as a committee of the Jewish Federation of Palm Beach County. As we begin our fifth year, we proudly number 120 trustees and plan to distribute up to $200,000 in this year’s allocations. We are a vital part of the ever-growing women’s funding movement that is dedicated to redressing the paucity of philanthropic dollars spent on women and girls.  

Open to all Jewish women who live and play in the Greater Palm Beaches*, we operate the JWF in a distinctive model of “trustee ownership” that affects who and what we fund, and the egalitarian way we conduct our philanthropic business.

Every fall we begin our annual grant review cycle by educating ourselves on issues adversely affecting the lives of women and girls around the world. 

Then, utilizing a democratic committee process, trustees consider the many funding requests received.  Grants are assessed in terms of their ability to identify emerging issues or their ability to eradicate or lessen one of the many; hardships that beset Jewish women and girls, here or around the world.

The grant committees recommend their choices to a gathering of all the trustees where each recommendation is again vetted and voted on. It is in this very pragmatic forum that the final decisions are made to invest in grants that we believe will change the circumstances of individual women as well as the attitudes, behaviors and practices of systems and communities.

OUR VISION

We believe that the key to strong and equitable Jewish communities is to ensure that women and girls are physically safe and empowered to achieve their potential.

We believe that investing our influence and resources in social change will make a difference in the lives of women and girls locally, nationally and internationally in ways that are consistent with the Jewish value of tikkun olam, a call to all Jews to help make the world a better place. 

We believe that advocating for an increase in funding to services that alleviate the hardships faced by marginalized women and girls is critically important given the chronic under-funding of such programs. 

We believe that social change is possible. Since we have limited resources to meet the multitude of individual needs, we will focus our funding on issue awareness, research, advocacy and pilot projects or experimental activities.

We believe that social change is a complex process that generally takes place incrementally over time and we will support work over three timeframes -- immediate, medium and long-term.

We believe that the long-term outcome of our work will be changes in community practices and programming, public policy, Jewish education and practice, laws and the practice of philanthropy.

OUR MISSION

Our mission is to improve the status of Jewish women and girls through funding women-centered social change initiatives. We realize our vision and mission by funding four interdependent approaches to social change:

1. Increasing public awareness of issues that directly and adversely affect the lives of women;
2. Funding research that identifies and examines the impact of that issue on the lives of women and girls;
3. Supporting leading-edge initiatives that are designed to change the attitudes, behaviors and practices of individuals and systems;
4. Advocating for changes in institutional or community practices, social policy and the law.

*Palm Beach Gardens, West Palm Beach, Palm Beach, Wellington, Royal Palm Beach, Boynton Beach, Lantana, Lake Worth, Greenancres, Lake Park, North Palm Beach, Juno Beach, Tequesta

To view the 2006-2007 grant recipients,
click here