Rebecca “Becky” Voorwinde, CEO of The Bronfman Fellowship, spoke with Albany writer Jay Deitcher for eJewishPhilanthropy about keeping donor-funded Jewish leadership programs alive once their founding funder is gone.

Voorwinde told Deitcher that philanthropist-funded leadership fellowships “have mostly fallen out of favor in the last few years,” tying that decline to a broader shift away from treating such programs as the “pet projects” of a single donor. Asked how the Fellowship built support beyond its founder, Edgar M. Bronfman Sr., she said these programs were “mostly created by individual funders, and it’s time for the whole Jewish community to grow up a little and recognize” their value. She pointed to the numbers behind that shift: the Fellowship’s community fundraising grew from a little over $100,000 in 2021 to more than $1 million in 2025.

The Bronfman Fellowship, based in New York City, runs a summer program for Jewish teens exploring pluralism and Jewish identity, along with Amitim for Israeli fellows and Campus Commons for Jewish college students.

Read the full interview at eJewishPhilanthropy: Bronfman Fellowship CEO: Leadership development programs ‘don’t just belong to one funder’.