created at: 2011-08-14There’s a revolution going on in Jewish Education.

The new norm is embracing change: If it’s old, then it’s irrelevant, and even if it’s kind of new, it’s probably outdated already.  In the Jewish world the PresenTense group has been carrying the banner of innovation and Jewish social entrepreneurship; here in Boston the second round of PresenTense fellows, featuring four Prozdor teachers, launched their ventures in late May.

At the same time we are beginning to realize that our students can do more, and at an earlier age, when given appropriate skills and training.  In fact, they can do a lot more than you might think, like running a t-shirt business, creating advocacy organizations, or designing back-end databases for business websites.

We’re lucky to live in a town where innovation exists not just in theory, but in practice.  Incubators for business development like the Cambridge Innovation Center provide infrastructure for people to ideate and innovate on a daily basis and surround themselves with other like-minded folks.  How many other cities have an entire Innovation District?

With all that in mind Prozdor is thrilled to be offering a full-year training program for Jewish teens in entrepreneurship and business ethics.  Taught by Josh Bob, a Prozdor graduate and the CEO of Textaurant, this course will be designed to give Prozdor students the skills to launch ventures in the 21st century. 

Students must apply to take this class (and the other intensive classes in our new Machon program) and commit to a year of completing required assignments and meeting certain benchmarks.  Not only that, but they will also receive mentoring and coaching from veteran entrepreneurs and community members and officially launch their ventures at a spring event that we will be hosting.

With a firm grounding in sound business practice, some financial support, and a healthy amount of Jewish context, this first cohort of Prozdor entrepreneurs will be well-positioned on the front lines of innovation.

And they might just change the world while they’re at it.

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