Wendy’s reflections on 15 years of Rosov Consulting opened our RC@15 celebrations, which included looking back on key projects over the past 15 years, hearing from our client partners about Rosov Consulting’s impact on their work, and learning with members of our senior leadership team in our quarterly newsletter.

We invested in our team through various initiatives including our first in-person staff retreat since the COVID-19 pandemic began and a new intensive career pathways and compensation framework process rooted in equity. We relished the opportunities to reflect, rejuvenate, and recommit together. Additionally, like so many of our colleagues in the field, we navigated the complexity of work in the Jewish community post-October 7 and supported one another—especially our Israel team—through this difficult time.

Our CASJE study on the Career Trajectories of Jewish Educators won the Ilia Salita Excellence in Research Award from the Genesis Philanthropy Group and the Jewish Funders Network. The award highlights research projects that can “impact Jewish life in a direct and positive way.”

We launched a groundbreaking longitudinal study, The Growing Educators and Leaders Study (GELS), with the Jim Joseph Foundation, on the growth and career advancement of Jewish educators and educational leaders.

Additionally, we launched several major studies about contemporary issues in Jewish life, including Jewish Families Today (sponsored by Crown Family Philanthropies, the Harold Grinspoon Foundation, and the Jim Joseph Foundation) and Lifting Up the Voices of the Jewish Poor (sponsored by the Harry and Jeannette Weinberg Foundation), which is being conducted in partnership with Tulane University.

We continued to support local Jewish communities in better understanding the needs, desires, and challenges of their constituents, both across the community as a whole as well as on specific issues such as education and engagement. We completed a major community study in Northern New Jersey and worked on additional studies in Silicon Valley (Northern California), Nevada, Detroit, and more.

We capitalized on our longstanding expertise in Israel experience programs through our partnership with RootOne, which welcomed over 7,000 teens to Israel in RootOne-supported programs. There is no question that post-October 7, this work will become even more important. We also worked with Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism to take the pulse of young adults immediately post-October 7, and we helped The Jewish Education Project reflect on one of the first educator missions to Israel in November.

We continued to partner with JPro to offer master classes on research and evaluation to its community of Jewish nonprofit professionals, and we developed a new workshop on “Reading Research,” which we piloted with program staff at the Jim Joseph Foundation. We also had the opportunity to share our work in person with researchers, practitioners, and Federation professionals, at conferences sponsored by the Network for Research in Jewish Education, American Evaluation Association, Association for Jewish Studies, Jewish Federations of North America, and Prizmah.

Altogether, we launched more than 50 new projects in 2023, with our work exploring topics such as day school climate and recruiting, Jewish human service agencies, online text learning, Orthodox Women’s leadership, teen and college student mental health, leadership development programs, constructive conversations, and much more.