What Gives? The Jewish Philanthropy Podcast · Jewish Funders Network

Laura Lauder - Philanthropic Leadership and Securing the Jewish Future

·51 min·3 clips

Laura Lauder describes being spit at outside a JCRC event in downtown San Francisco.

1. What Gives? The Jewish Philanthropy Podcast features Laura Lauder on leadership, legacy, and Jewish philanthropy in San Francisco. 2. Host Andres Fokoidi interviews Laura Lauder, board chair of the San Francisco Jewish Community Federation and Endowment Fund, and she ties her work to Henry Morgenthau Jr. and her family’s 1948 letter about raising money for a Jewish state. 3. The episode asks how Lauder’s philanthropy moved from traditional Jewish giving into venture philanthropy, impact investing, and federation leadership. 4. Lauder says that at 23 she moved to San Francisco, felt alone, and was invited by Phyllis Cook to learn about the Jewish Federation. 5. She says joining the UJ Young Leadership Cabinet and making a $5,000 commitment on her first trip to Israel started her philanthropic path. 6. Andres Fokoidi connects her story to peer influence, giving circles, and the way social networks shape philanthropy. 7. Lauder says her entrepreneurial instinct made “just giving to large organizations” insufficient. 8. She describes creating Delet, short for day school leadership through teaching, after noticing too few Jewish teachers were teaching general studies in her children’s Jewish day school. 9. She says Delet was designed as a narrow, targeted intervention and that hundreds of Delet fellows are now in Jewish day schools across America. 10. The conversation then turns to donor-advised funds and impact loans as tools for recycling capital in the community. 11. Lauder says about $250 billion sits in U.S. donor-advised funds and roughly $120 billion of it is in cash or cash-like positions. 12. She argues that impact loans could fund Jewish educators’ master’s degrees, PhDs, housing, and health care while allowing dollars to return to donor-advised funds. 13. She names the Jim Joseph Foundation, JFM, Federations, and major foundations as possible partners for a broader Jewish educator loan pool. 14. Lauder lays out four buckets of capital: market returns only, finance-first impact, impact loans with reduced returns, and philanthropy with “100% negative IRR.” 15. She says bucket two can include mission-related investments in Israeli venture funds, environmental companies, solar panels, and medical device companies. 16. She mentions Ronald Cohen’s book Impact and its idea of impact accounting, which she says could help investors evaluate public companies’ energy use, environment, and labor impact. 17. Lauder describes San Francisco as a highly assimilated Jewish community and “the canary in the coal mine” for American Jewry. 18. She cites a community study showing about 350,000 Jews in the Bay Area, 35% under 35, 40% of those households with a person of color, and over 70% middle income and below. 19. The episode has an interview style with detailed back-and-forth, frequent examples, and a practical tone focused on systems, dollars, and organizational design. 20. People interested in Jewish philanthropy, federation strategy, and impact investing will get the most from this episode, while listeners seeking light entertainment or broad theology may skip it.

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