The Challenge:

UVM Hillel wanted to inspire 2,500 students to make an “enduring commitment” to Jewish life and to make every UVM student feel “welcomed, wanted, and cared about.” While 1,000 students were regularly engaged, Hillel needed something that would double meaningful engagement while decreasing organizational costs and meeting the needs of diverse students.

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Initial Research and Definition:

I began by recruiting and training a cross-section of students in the process of Human-Centered Design and approaches to empathy. We then conducted an initial 2 months of interviews with students ranging from “extreme” to “mainstream.” Key groups we worked with were students who came to every Shabbat, students who had disavowed Hillel because of negative experiences, students who refused to step foot inside the building because of ideological differences, students who were formerly very involved and then stopped be- ing involved, and students who had graduated. We put special emphasis on interviewing students from each class year and from various social groups.

From this qualitative user research, we found the following key barriers to Hillel’s goal:

1: Not knowing other people at Hillel and wanting to spend Friday night with their individual friend groups stopped people from coming to Hillel.

2: While fun for some, Shabbat at Hillel was a total mis- match for others. Certain users enjoyed the size, others felt it was overwhelming, impersonal, irrelevant to their lifestyle or even hard on their accessibility needs.

3: Students who excelled at building community and Jewish meaning making events on-campus often felt confused and sad about how to create meaningful Jewish experiences upon graduation. They felt a void of Jewish life. This meant Hillel had not met its top explicit goal.

4: Unexpected finding: Students really didn’t like the food on campus, so Hillel Shabbats offered something different. Furthermore, students generally didn’t know how to cook or have easy access to supermarkets, so they could not create a dinner experience by them- selves despite a strong desire to do so.

5: Bonus finding: Sustainability seemed to be of great interest to students across the spectrum.

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Key reframe: instead of Hillel staff hosting ever larger events inside the building, how might we empower students to be the builders of their own communities?

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Question Generation, Brainstorming, & Prototyping

The students and I then spent a month 1) distilling the broader needs, wants, and desires of the students to craft user POV statements, 2) writing “how might we” questions, and 3) establishing design principles so that we would be able to identify our best ideas. We then hosted a brainstorm, from which the idea for Hillel Fresh was born: a Shabbat experience kit delivered to students’ doors that provides and teaches them every- thing they need to cook and host their own customizable Shabbat for as many friends (Jewish and non-Jewish) as they’d like.

By teaching students how to cook via Hillel Fresh, our plan was to connect the core enduring life skill of cook- ing with the act of community building, sustainability, and their Jewish identity. We would be providing them the opportunity to create a very unique and engaging social gathering that would build the experience, confidence, and desire to continue building Jewish life (whatever that might mean to the specific student) after graduation. Additionally, this project would have a level of customization and scalability that could not be achieved at the typical centralized Hillel events.

Prototypes and Results:

After progressively growing prototype rounds, I monitored results through a range of quantitative and qualitative survey tools, our Salesforce CRM, and inter- views. We found that participants mainly hosted guests who had never been to Hillel, many of whom were not Jewish. This meant we were making progress towards the goal of increased engagement, while also working towards the goal of making all students feel welcomed, wanted and cared about. At the same time, we found that most hosts continued leading Shabbats on their own between project runs and into the summer, in both cases without direct project resources. This meant Hillel Fresh was indeed addressing Hillel’s top goal, “an enduring commitment to Jewish Life” which interviews had revealed was not occurring with the same frequency before.

The program became so popular, the initial Hillel Fresh prototypes became UVM Hillel’s largest event of Spring 2019 (40 hosts and 291 participants). Experiencing exponential growth, the first Hillel Fresh of 2020 exceed- ed the combined size of the 5 prototype test runs in 2019 by 50%. Hillel Fresh is now on track to double the size of UVM Hillel engagement using 1/14th the cost of a business as usual approach.

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Major finding: through intentional resource sharing and scaffold-ing, the majority of students quickly moved from dependence upon Hillel to self-confidence and independent capacity.

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Continued Prototyping, Reframes, and Enhancement:

Throughout each Hillel Fresh round we constantly redeveloped and tested each component through user re- search. For example, responding to students’ desire to remember the evenings more and noticing their blank walls, we had a fun custom piece of wall worthy art commissioned for each recipe we delivered and included it with each kit. Noticing students’ love of stickers, we had these turned into stickers and in the process created great marketing for Hillel Fresh. Responding to students wondering what the rituals of Shabbat meant, we created intuitive gratitude exercises meaningful to people of every background so that everyone could get something out of the typical rituals, rather than having hosts feel awkward while reading an explanation. We also created a pot and pan lending service to serve students in the Residence Halls, and had students of diverse backgrounds write a variety of hosting guides.

Long Term Goal:

Hillel Fresh is building a future where hundreds of thousands of young Jewish students and their friends of all faiths, beliefs, and ways of being are actively build- ing community and gratitude through the celebration of their unique values and traditions. A future where people have the confidence and skills to create person-

al experiences in their homes that are so meaningful, so special, that every Jewish student can’t help but want to live Jewishly, simultaneously encouraging their friends to bring what’s special to them, starting with the wonder of Shabbat.

And healing our ecosystems too:

According to Project Drawdown, the food system is one of our single largest opportunities to heal the planet. Hillel Fresh was dually designed to teach an entire generation to engage with a sustainable food system that is easier, more actionable, more social, and more timely than non-sustainable systems. All recipes are plant based, which if adopted has more of an impact on carbon than forgoing all cars, planes, and other forms of transit. Each kit also sources local and seasonal ingredients, explaining the story of the food to the stu- dents. Because students are learning to cook through Hillel Fresh, whether they intend it or not, they are only developing the skills for a more sustainable approach to food.

The State of Hillel Fresh Today:

Two years after fully transferring the project to student leaders, Hillel Fresh has continued to grow, increasing engagement, capacity, sustainability, and cost efficacy. In the spring of 2021, 1,600 students co-hosted a Hillel Fresh and 2,000 received food from the Hillel Farm.