Your Daily Phil: UpStart and Giving Group Community’s new partnership + How an eco-village connects spiritually | CPT PPP Coverage

Cryptopolytech (CPT) Public Press Pass (PPP)
News of the Day COVERAGE

200000048 – World Newser
•| #World |•| #Online |•| #Media |•| #Outlet |

View more Headlines & Breaking News here, as covered by cryptopolytech.com

Good Tuesday morning, and happy new year!

In today’s Your Daily Phil, we report on a new partnership between a Bay Area social entrepreneurship incubator and an Israeli platform for funders and feature an op-ed about a unique cohousing eco-village in Vermont. Also in this newsletter: Pope Benedict XVI, Bill Gates and Brian Roberts. We’ll start with a look at a delegation of student leaders landing in Israel today.

Most of the 40 participants in the Geller International Fellowship, who are due to touch down at Ben Gurion Airport this afternoon, were sitting in front of laptops in their parents’ homes when the Abraham Accords were signed in September 2020. Taking remote classes, many at that point had never experienced or observed the challenging dynamics facing Jewish and pro-Israel students on college campuses. The Israel on Campus Coalition, which is organizing the trip, hopes that the experience — the first of its kind to bring college students from all over the U.S. to both Israel and the United Arab Emirates, one of the signatories to the Accords— will open those students to a new Middle East.

“There are Israelis on our trip that are able to use their Israeli passport to go to Dubai,” Megan Nathan, ICC’s chief operating officer, told eJewishPhilanthropy. “We’re meeting with changemakers who revolutionized the Middle East. Our kids won’t think that it’s a big deal when they go from Tel Aviv to Dubai, and if only they knew how the landscape has changed, and the people that had to be visionaries to do that. Our hope is that these students can be visionaries in their own way.”

“American support for Israel is not self-sustaining,” Jacob Baime, ICC’s CEO, told eJP, adding that the Jewish community “must identify, engage and educate tomorrow’s political leaders while they are on campus today.” 

“In launching the inaugural Geller mission,” Baime added, “ICC is taking an important step toward building a community of pro-Israel leaders for the next generation.”

The trip is funded by businessman and philanthropist Marty Geller and his wife, Lauren Schor Geller. The Gellers are also supporters of ICC’s National Leadership Summit, which brought 200 student leaders to Washington in August for three days of high-level seminars and workshops. The second annual summit, scheduled for this summer, plans to double the number of attendees.

In the lead-up to the 10-day, two-country trip, which includes meetings with Jerusalem Deputy Mayor Fleur Hassan-Nahoum and Israeli Ambassador to the UAE Amir Hayek, among others, and a visit to Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque in Dubai, the students participated in regular seminars with subject-matter experts. 

ICC’s deepening engagement with student leaders comes amid growing challenges on college campuses, from the proposed ban on Zionist speakers at the University of California, Berkeley’s law school to the exclusion of pro-Israel students from campus groups on the East Coast. In recent years, AIPAC, which had previously invested heavily in campus work, shifted its campus efforts to match the organization’s overall strategy and focus on electing pro-Israel candidates to office.

As college students, Nathan and Baime were AIPAC campus activists, and both went on to work for the organization as field organizers after graduating. “Jacob and I know firsthand the importance of campus activism, having started our advocacy careers as AIPAC student activists and later members of AIPAC’s professional staff,” Nathan told eJP.