Leadership Team

Our leadership team has decades of experience training young adults, supporting volunteers and implementing programs in developing nations. It is a blend of in-house staff, volunteers, and staff of organizational partners:

Yonatan Glaser is the LIFE Director and founder of B’Tzedek. He has successfully developed and managed year programs for young adults during over 20 years in informal Jewish education and leadership development. Yonatan has worked with Israeli school principals, non-profit organizations and managed and developed year programs for young Jews from the Diaspora in Israel for five years. He served as the Central Educational Shaliach to the Reform Movement in North America, he helped spearhead the development of Carmel, a new year program for school graduates. Yonatan has worked extensively with student populations in North America and Israel. A trained lawyer with an M.A. in Jewish Thought from Hebrew University, he is a graduate of the Mandel Leadership Institute’s School for Educational Leadership in Israel and he has published academically on leadership development, Judaism and social vision (see here). Active himself in civil society, Yonatan has served on the Board of various organizations and appeared in the press about the influx of African asylum seekers to Israel (see here).

Uzi Israeli (see below) voluntarily works with Yonatan on the Development Studies and the overall learning program of LIFE.

Mark Zober (see below) voluntarily works with Yonatan on the overseas volunteer placement program of LIFE

Group staff will be added to the staff team as the program start date nears.

The following top Israeli organizations have become operational partners with LIFE, sharing their professional expertise and working with us as a broad team to bring LIFE to life:

• The Israel Experience (expertise in housing, logistics, security)

• The Machon L’Madrichei Chutz L’Aretz (Institute for Leadership Development of JAFI)

• The (Israeli) Training Center for Mind-Body Skills (connected to the Washington-based The Center for Mind-Body Medicine)

• The International Leadership Institute, Beit Berl

• Kibbutz Lotan (here)

• Shatil (Israel’s leading agency for social change capacity building for non-profit organizations, founded by the New Israel Fund)

This list is partial and may change.

Advisory Team

Dr. Jen Glaser is senior faculty at the Mandel Leadership Institute, Jerusalem. She specializes and publishes in philosophy of education, pluralism, community and the development of thinking. Jen works with short-term and multi-year educational seminars for promising middle and high-level Jewish and Israeli Education leadership. She is the co-Director of the Israeli Center for Philosophy in Education – ‘Philosophy for Life’ and the President of the International Council of Philosophical Inquiry with Children. Jen is adjunct faculty at the Melton Center for Jewish Education, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Jody Zall Kusek leads the World Bank’s Global HIV/AIDS Monitoring and Evaluation Group in providing support to countries to analyze and use data to better understand the trends and drivers of their epidemic and to better monitor and manage the national response to the epidemic in their country.  Previously she was the Africa Regions’ Advisor on Results Based Management; helping countries in 35 African Nations improve their ability to design government policies and programs to support poverty reduction.   She co-developed a training program for government officials and their development partners in designing and building performance-based monitoring and evaluation systems to support good public management.  With another colleague, she developed the Model of 10-Steps to a Results Based Monitoring and Evaluation system that is used all over the world to support government strategic planning and programming.  This program is also taught in 10 United States Universities and is currently being used by the Government of China to develop their 10th 5 year plan.  Before joining the Bank, Ms. Kusek was Principal Management Advisor to the U.S. Secretary of Energy, advising on new management reform and with Vice President Al Gore in the William Clinton Administration on improving management of the United States Government.  She advises Governments all over the world in the area of results management and has served on the boards of public sector organizations in support of this goal.  

Dr. Mike Naftali is the founder and Chairperson of Brit Olam. He was the CEO of Elem for 20 years, an organization he led to be Israel’s leading and largest organization for youth at risk. At Tel Aviv University, Mike taught and researched youth, volunteerism, civil society issues and Israel’s Bedouin community. A long-time consultant to the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Mike traveled to and worked in many countries across Africa, Asia and South America. He is a former Chair of the Israel Association for Volunteer Organizations, the founder of www.ivolunteer.org.il , Israel’s most-used web portal for volunteers and a frequent keynote speaker in Israeli civil society settings.

Dr. Einat Wilf is a Fellow with The Jewish People Policy Planning Institute and is pursuing the implementation of the detailed policy solutions for fixing Israel's education system contained in her second book, "Back to Basics". Previously Ms. Wilf served as the Foreign Policy Advisor to the Vice Prime Minister of Israel Shimon Peres. Ms. Wilf is a graduate of Harvard University, has an MBA from INSEAD in France and a PhD with Cambridge University in the UK. Prior to working for the Israeli Government she worked as a consultant with McKinsey & Co. in New York and as a Managing Partner with Koor Corporate Venture Capital in Israel. Ms. Wilf's first book "Founders, Fighters and Us - Of Israel's Young Generation" was published in Israel in 2003. Ms. Wilf publishes editorials frequently with the Israeli and Foreign press.

Oren Yosifon – Chief Technology Officer of Israeli high-tech firm Mindcite, Oren is responsible for the thinking behind and development of their product, a sophisticated knowledge creation and management system that in real time, mines complex organizations and the internet to deliver knowledge to client’s staff. Oren works with Mindcite clients around the world to adapt, integrate, and embed their system in the client’s operations. Alongside this cutting-edge, sophisticated system, Oren has a keen interest in how the latest technological developments and trends, many of them low cost or free, can be put to use for social benefit in the non-profit world.

Dr Mark Zober has worked during his career in the areas of Jewish communal service, education, community, volunteer management and international development.  His PhD. is in social welfare management and policy from Brandeis University. He served for four years in the United States Peace Corps in India and Sierra Leone and later served as the Peace Corps Director in Mongolia. Mark has taught social service administration and program evaluation at Brandeis, Cornell, Boston University, Hebrew and Haifa universities. He served as a Jewish Federation Executive Director in Texas and later headed the research division at the Israeli Ministry of Social Services. Mark has been a United Nations Development Program Senior Advisor and serves on the Rotary International Advisory Committee for International Projects, traveling widely to evaluate projects for their suitability for Rotary support. He is President Elect of the Jerusalem Rotary club.

Additional people will be joining the Advisory Team