Home › Blog › Kol Yisrael: Bridging Communities Through Effective Philanthropy
There is a limit to what any single donor can accomplish alone. There is almost no limit to what donors can accomplish together. At the Jewish Community Foundation of The Jewish Federation of Greater Washington, collaborative funds are one of the most powerful expressions of that truth—bringing together individuals who share a conviction, pooling their resources, and directing them with precision toward the causes and communities they care about most. The Foundation provides the infrastructure, the vetting, and the expertise. The donors bring the values, the relationships, and the will to act. What follows are five examples of what happens when that partnership works—from the streets of Beit Shemesh to the offices of Greater Washington’s Jewish organizations, from the next generation of women leaders in Israel to the Jewish teenagers still finding their way home.
The four funds below span continents, causes, and communities, but each one is rooted in the same conviction: that giving together is not just more effective.
It is Kol Yisrael arevim zeh bazeh—the ancient Jewish conviction that we are all responsible for one another.
Some of the most important investments a community can make are invisible from the outside.
The Jewish Talent Project is one of them. Funded collectively by Phil Margolius, Scott Brown, the Phyllis Margolius Family Foundation, and a group of local donors from the Jewish Community Foundation, JTP is quietly reshaping how Greater Washington attracts, supports, and retains the professionals who power Jewish communal life. Senior Director Adam Levner, brings nearly 25 years of leadership development experience to the role, and is leading three interconnected efforts:
The investment is a straightforward one: when Jewish professionals thrive, so does everything they touch.
Collective giving, guided by ongoing learning, can do what one-time grants cannot.
What began with crisis response grants in 2023—directing nearly $300,000 across three rounds to Israeli organizations supporting survivors of sexual violence, displaced women, and the next generation of women leaders—has grown into a dual-track effort: sustaining women’s leadership and rights in Israel while closing critical gaps for women and girls in the DMV. In 2026, the Fund awarded its first domestic grant round of $100,000, targeting critical gaps for women and girls in Greater Washington at pivotal life stages: birth, adolescence, and early adulthood.
This Fund is cheshbon nefesh (honest self-reflection) and shituf p’ulah (collaboration) in practice—a fund that doesn’t just write checks, but learns, evaluates, and adapts, always in pursuit of a world where women and girls can thrive.
Established in memory of beloved Charles E. Smith Jewish Day School teacher, Dorit Schwartz, this fund supports B’nai Mitzvahs for students who might not otherwise be able to access this important rite of passage. The scholarships operate in partnership with Charles E Smith Jewish Day School and Yozma in Israel, where Dorit grew up. Congregation Yozma located in Modi’in operates the first State-recognized Reform public elementary Jewish Day School in Israel and each year holds a special B’Nei Mitzvah celebration each year with the Beit Eden home for developmentally-challenged children from low-income families.
“I really didn’t understand what it was to be Jewish—and this was such a life-changing experience. Thank you.”
That letter, from a teenager changed by a summer at BBYO’s International Kallah, is exactly what Sue Ducat hoped for when she created the Ducat Cohen Family Philanthropic Fund in memory of her late husband Stanley Cohen. For Ducat, philanthropy has always been about more than writing a check: “It’s less about philanthropy than it is about being active in the community.” The fund, now in its fourth year, provides scholarships for Jewish teens—particularly those outside the Jewish day school world—to explore their Jewish identity in an immersive setting. This summer, the fund is also providing scholarships for BBYO programs visiting Israel and Europe, allowing recipients to tour concentration camps and other historic sites, carrying forward Stanley’s conviction that the lessons of the Holocaust cannot be inherited passively: they must be sought, witnessed, and felt. The chain of Jewish memory, Stanley knew, is only as strong as the hands willing to pass it forward.
Not every collaborative fund begins with a global crisis, but when a crisis comes, funds that are already there can respond with an urgency that no single donor acting alone could match. On March 1, 2026, an Iranian missile struck a residential neighborhood in Beit Shemesh, Israel—killing nine people, destroying homes, and hitting a public bomb shelter. For the donors behind the Fund in Support of At-Risk Youth in Beit Shemesh, this was not a distant headline. It was a direct blow to a community they had been quietly investing in for years. Long before the missiles fell, this collaborative fund—housed at the Jewish Community Foundation—was already sustaining the work of Zinman Matnas Center and its staff, who show up every day for teenagers who might otherwise have no one: one-on-one mentorship, musical events, and a steady presence for teens at risk of falling through the cracks between a traditional Torah world and the pressures of modern life. The attack made the work more urgent. The fund made sure it could continue.