At OLAM Conference, Jewish Aid and Development Workers Learn to Innovate as Field Squeezed by Cuts
On the first day of this week’s Focal Point conference, the annual gathering in New York City of Jewish and Israeli aid and development professionals hosted by the umbrella group Olam, one of the most attended sessions focused on developing alternative funding and financial sustainability models — a sign of the growing financial challenges facing the field.
“Since I started coming to Olam, this is the first time that really everyone is having a hard time,” Jacob Sztokman, the founding director of Gabriel Project Mumbai, an India-based holistic development organization, who attended the session, told eJewishPhilanthropy on Tuesday, the day after the session.
Olam CEO Dyonna Ginsburg described the situation as a series of “compounding crises” that have been facing the field in recent years — both in general and particularly for Jewish organizations and Jewish employees of secular organizations.
First, there was the COVID-19 pandemic. Then came Hamas’ terror attacks on southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, followed swiftly by a rise in antisemitic and anti-Israel sentiment that made international aid work increasingly isolating. Then came the second Trump administration, whose anti-immigration policies derailed nonprofits involved in immigration work, and the mass cuts to USAID, which threw the broader humanitarian sector into a tailspin.
Add to that the fact that post-Oct. 7, many Jewish funders allocated their donations to causes within Israel or connected to combating antisemitism. This left Israeli NGOs that primarily operate abroad scrambling as they sought to resume their relief work in other countries, and other organizations that previously relied on Jewish donors short on funds, Evan Majzner, executive director of JDC Entwine, said during the opening plenary.
“After Oct. 7, a lot of funders felt like they needed to shake the snow globe,” Majzner said. “Projects that they had been supporting for so long didn’t necessarily fit that strategy. It wasn’t that they had a revised strategy where other things could fit. It just felt like, ‘OK, well, we want to try something new, and so we’re going to shift things’ — but that left large voids that I think continue to evolve today.”
Within the broader humanitarian sector, anti-Israel and antisemitic sentiment became more pronounced, placing pressure on Israelis and Jews involved in non-Jewish and non-Israeli nonprofits. According to Ginsburg, Olam research conducted last year found that 55% of Jewish professionals in secular aid and development organizations reported experiencing antisemitism in the workplace, while 57% reported encountering anti-Israel sentiment.
That dynamic also took a personal toll on Jewish professionals working outside the Jewish sector. Olam’s individual membership — Jews employed at secular organizations like UNICEF or Save the Children rather than at explicitly Jewish ones — has grown to more than 200 people, a dramatic increase since Oct. 7, Shoshana Boyd Gelfand, the director of leadership and learning at the Pears Foundation, one of the main funders of Olam, told eJP on the sidelines of the conference. Many described being prevented from forming Jewish affinity groups within their own workplaces and finding, in Focal Point, something that filled that role instead, she added.
“I personally think they are crucial ambassadors. I don’t want to see them leave their organizations and come work in the Jewish sector. I actually think the fact that they are there and they are able to speak as Jews — we have to support them. Otherwise, we’ve just given up the whole sector to the antisemites,” she said.
In another sign of the times, this year’s conference, which was held on Monday and Tuesday at UJA-Federation of New York’s Manhattan offices, also featured fewer local partners and country directors from developing nations who have previously attended the gathering due to concerns about tightening U.S. visa policies and travel restrictions, Ginsburg told eJP.
“We still have people from 16 different countries, so it definitely is a global Jewish gathering,” she said, “but that has been something that resulted from the current circumstances.”
While many smaller Jewish and Israeli organizations were initially insulated from the USAID cuts because they did not receive direct government funding, Ginsburg said, they are increasingly feeling the effects, as intermediary organizations that regranted government funds face their own financial shortfalls.
According to Boyd Gelfand, organizations in this sector are getting “squashed from two sides” — the post-Oct. 7 reshuffling of Jewish communal priorities on one hand, and the broader collapse of Western government aid funding on the other.
“The priorities of the global Jewish community are, I wouldn’t even say shifting, I would just say it’s a bit in freefall, as people try to figure out and scramble to address antisemitism, anti-Israel issues, Jewish identity, security,” she said. “[And] the larger sector of humanitarian aid and international development [is] just bottoming out.”
The squeeze was felt — and discussed — widely by those in attendance, both onstage and on the sidelines. It has also led a number of nonprofits within the sector to begin exploring alternative funding models to reduce their dependence on philanthropy.
Following the widely attended Monday morning session, titled “Unlocking New Funding Models for an Evolving Ecosystem,” Sztokman described the budget shortfalls that his organization has been facing in recent years.
The Gabriel Project, founded around 14 years ago, operates on an annual budget of about $500,000 — a sum that, given local costs, goes fairly far, said Sztokman. His organization’s malnutrition program, for instance, provides nutritious daily meals to severely malnourished children for roughly 35 cents per meal.
This article was originally published in eJewish Philanthropy's Your Daily Phil on June 3, 2026.
