Good Wednesday morning!
In today’s edition of Your Daily Phil, we profile the Senser Foundation’s efforts to upgrade nonprofits’ technology, and feature op-eds from Shira Ruderman and Jonathan S. Kessler. We’ll start with last night’s United Hatzalah gala in New York.
Five hundred dollars; that’s all it takes to save a life, Mark Gerson, United Hatzalah’s international chairman of the board, explained to an audience of nearly 1,000 people on Tuesday night at the organization’s fourth annual gala in New York, reports Jewish Insider’s Tori Bergel for eJewishPhilanthropy.
Based on a series of quick calculations, Gerson concluded, taking into account the cost of training each of United Hatzalah’s medics, the organization’s total number of volunteers and the lives saved each year: $500 equals one life saved. It seemed a reasonable return on investment for gala attendees, who later in the night would donate tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars on new equipment for the organization (there were also a handful of donations that reached the million-dollar mark, including that of keynote speaker, New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft, and his wife, Dana).
By the time dessert was served, members of the audience had pledged upwards of $5 million to the organization, according to a rolling tally that was displayed on a monitor during the event. (The organization did not immediately release a final total.) But while the event’s goal may have been fundraising, the theme of the evening was unity.
Kraft, who has spent tens of millions of dollars on efforts to combat antisemitism, spoke about the hatred permeating today’s society and the ways communities must act to stifle it. “United Hatzalah is also facing a world of fracture, divisiveness and hate, but it brings out the best in a complicated world, one person at a time, one relationship at a time,” Kraft said. “Because when someone is in harm’s way, within 90 seconds there’s a United Hatzalah ambulance. Jews save the lives of Arabs, Arabs save the lives of Jews, secular people save the lives of the religious and religious people save the lives of [the] secular.”
Read the full story here.
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