Whether working to generate an ethic of civic obligation in Israel or to develop scalable environmental initiatives, social entrepreneurs can help organizations and communities transform themselves for the sake of their local environment and the world.

Barack Obama’s political campaign in the United States showed the world the power of online community organizing and its potential for empowering the broad mass of individuals to participate in communal decision-making. In mobilizing community members to act in the interest of change for the better, social entrepreneurs can develop and utilize communications technologies to do for the Jewish People what Obama did for the American People.

Using new technologies, creative 21st-century educational tools can impart Jewish values, make our historic traditions accessible to learners, and ensure relevancy for the future. In building such infrastructure, innovators are bridging the gaps between past and present, Israel and the Diaspora.

Arts education, Jewish texts, and creation—in combination, these areas can have a powerful influence on students’ growth and development. Social innovators in arts education seek to explore how to capitalize on the intersection between these fields and mobilize teachers to integrate arts into Jewish education.

After Bernard Madoff and the economic recession, as the damage to the nonprofit world was revealed with cutbacks and the closure of social ventures and foundations across the spectrum, we were asked whether this was a good year to train and launch another class of PresenTense fellows. “Is it fair,” we were asked, “to get someone’s hopes up when even existing ventures can’t stay afloat?”

Over the past decade, funders and philanthropies, large and small, have invested more than $500 million in a wide range of new Jewish organizations, communities, and start-up ventures. Philanthropic investment in innovation has reflected the aspirations of funders to promote certain key values, such as pluralism, openness, and inclusion. Diverse—even contradictory—ideas and practices co-exist in an atmosphere of respectful pluralism, fostering exploration, entrepreneurship, and an “open tent” model of Jewish community, whereby anyone can enter from his or her own particular perspective.

Recent years have seen an explosion of small, independent Jewish organizations—more than 300 in operation as of January 2009, according to a survey by Jumpstart, reaching upwards of 400,000 people, a significant number of which are young adults. This growth makes for a compelling argument that the next generation is turning away from the ‘establishment’ and towards new Jewish outlets they find compelling.

In a globalized world, with advances in technology that have made connections between people across the world more feasible, one could argue that a poor community across the world could be considered to be within one’s primary sphere of obligation, even in terms of proximity. According to this argument, modern microfinance is a logical extension of Jewish charitable values, and an innovative method for fighting global poverty.

The Elders of Zion had it right—money and Jews go hand in hand. Philanthropy runs through the Jewish world like veins run though our bodies.

There is no doubt that this has been a “unique” year to be a fundraiser for the Jewish community. I use the word “unique” in place of words like “tragic,” “challenging,” and “catastrophic” to set apart current financial pressures from the dire circumstances around the world that the Jewish community handles on an ongoing basis. These times provide an opportunity to refocus the work that we do—by re-embracing our traditional understanding of the term tzedakah and emphasizing one transformative tool: “soul.”