KIVUNIM

KIVUNIM must ensure that its programs are available to all worthy applicants regardless of their family’s financial situation.  Each year we receive applications from families struggling to support the educational and other basic needs of their children.  Single parent families, parents who have lost employment or have been significantly downsized, families in which catastrophic illness of a child or parent has shattered well-intentioned plans for college funding and other major expenses, etc.  

 

Why support KIVUNIM you might ask? Why is it so important that students take a gap-year with you? The answer is straightforward: because the quality and imagination of today's Jewish education will determine the whole future of the Jewish people. We must provide dynamic, innovative, intellectually challenging and Jewishly expansive academic and experiential programs to attract our finest high school graduates in North America and eventually from around the world. 

 

Without it our future leadership will be lacking a sense of the depth and magnificence of the Jewish experience.  They will not know who they are, who we are and what we are capable of becoming.  This is the new Zionism for the 21st century! KIVUNIM is educationally cutting-edge, breaking the stereotypical idea that Jewish identity can be developed only in insular, cacoon-like environments. We openly engage the “other” across the world.

 

We’re based in Jerusalem, studying about and then traveling to dozens of Diaspora communities, from Morocco to India, generating an informed international Jewish identity aware of the majestic history of the Jewish people in dynamic relationship to the cultures within which we lived.

 

But KIVUNIM is also engaged with the global future and we co-sponsored the first Holocaust Conference in the Arab world in 2011, and created the first Israel Seminar for Arab Muslim youth in 2012.  We study with the leadership of religious communities in the Christian, Muslim, Hindu and Buddhist communities around the world. As we say in our logo, We are “building the future."

We devote up to 20% of our potential gross tuition to financial aid that allows us to distribute an annual average of $500,000 in a combination of needs-based scholarships and small interest-free loans. Approximately 50% of our students receive financial aid ranging from $5000 to $40000 with the average award being $15,000.  Families submit a copy of the “Fafsa” form they have prepared for college scholarships and an indication of what amount they feel their family is capable of paying (always higher than what the fafsa process expects of them). The $10,000 being paid by recipients of our highest awards come from families with incomes of under $40,000 a year.

 

In order to provide this assistance, we must make up this tuition gap through gifts from committed donors.  We are too young to have developed an endowment. 

We have developed a unique educational approach to the distribution of scholarships, requiring each student (not parent) to sign the following “Student Ethical Commitment” upon receipt:

 

I agree that I will make every effort to repay KIVUNIM for the amount of my scholarship when I get older, thereby enabling another student to someday have the opportunity that is being provided to me today. I understand that this is not a formal promissory note, but rather an ethical pledge to do so as I grow older and become a donor to various causes and projects in the years ahead.  I agree that KIVUNIM may remind me of this pledge in the future.  If, at the time I am able to fulfill this pledge, KIVUNIM is no longer in existence I will seek out another program of comparable Jewish educational philosophy and provide the funds to them. (Repayment may be made in a lump sum or in smaller amounts over a period of years and these payments will be accepted as fully tax deductable contributions.)

SUPPORT KIVUNIM's SCHOLARSHIP PROGRAM

Revolving Scholarship Fund