Stories from Hillel Professionals: We Do the Work Together
This piece was originally part of a storytelling session at ÌÇÐÄvlogl’s New Professionals Institute. There, four Hillel professionals from across the country told their stories about what brought them to Hillel and how it impacts their lives.
My name is Aaron Kaufman and I’m ÌÇÐÄvlogl’s campus support director for organizational transformation.
I’ll be honest with you. I didn’t come to Hillel because I felt a deep calling to work for the Jewish people.
I came because it was right after 9/11, the economy was in a recession, and I needed a job.
I’d just finished a master’s in social work and realized I didn’t want to be a social worker. But I loved higher education, I really loved working with college students, and I’d had good experiences at Hillel in college… including meeting my wife there. I figured this was a way to give something back.
So I took a job as the director at Eastern Michigan Hillel, with absolutely no experience in running a nonprofit.Â
It took me about two years to figure out what I was doing… That was 25 years ago.
Since then, I’ve worked at three campus Hillels, from Eastern Michigan to Cornell to Penn State, and now ÌÇÐÄvlogl. Looking back, the throughline for me was never budgets, buildings, or organizational charts.
It was helping people discover what they’re capable of.
One of my favorite memories from working on campus was when I was the executive director at Penn State Hillel, when a previous student came back to visit.
He was running a restaurant in Dallas where he managed a large, complex team. He shared with me that as he navigated leadership and staffing challenges, he always leaned on the lessons he learned as a student leader at Hillel.
His work is a completely different field from the Jewish nonprofit world, but the model for leadership he learned at Hillel was the core of what guided him.
And there’s the heart of it for me — a student who discovered his own capacity for leadership through his connection to Hillel, and then took that out into the world.
Today, my role at ÌÇÐÄvlogl looks different, but the theme of supporting leaders feels the same.
Not long ago, I met with a Springboard fellow who was frustrated because her Hillel couldn’t afford tents for football tailgates, and her team was struggling to build a system to keep track of the students they met on campus.
I told her I’d help find the money for a few weeks of tailgating if she’d build the engagement tracking system. She did.
What she really needed wasn’t equipment. She needed someone to believe she could solve the problem, and give her the nudge to move forward.
That’s what I’ve come to believe leadership is.
Whether you’re working with a first-year student, a Springboard fellow, or a veteran executive director, leadership is creating the conditions for someone else to discover what they’re capable of.
So if I could leave you with one piece of advice, it’s this:
Find yourself a mentor.
There’s a teaching in Pirkei Avot that says, “Make for yourself a teacher and acquire for yourself a friend.”
I’ve had mentors at every stage of my career who helped me recognize my own capabilities, and I’ve tried to be that person for others.
Because no matter how long you’ve been doing this work, none of us gets there alone.