ROI Community

The ROI Community was a global network of young Jewish innovators, social entrepreneurs, artists, activists, and communal professionals founded in 2006 by the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies. The name stood for "return on investment." Over nearly two decades, it grew to more than 1,700 members in 60 countries, convening annually at a summit in Jerusalem and supporting members through micro-grants and year-round programming. The program closed on July 1, 2026.

The ROI Community was established in 2006 by Lynn Schusterman as an initiative of the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies. It was originally co-developed with Birthright Israel and the Israel Democracy Institute, with early support from the Bernie Marcus Foundation.^[1] The program's name, ROI, stood for "return on investment," reflecting Schusterman's philanthropic philosophy of backing early-stage leaders who would generate lasting communal impact.

The first ROI summit, known as ROI120, gathered 120 young Jewish leaders in Israel in 2006. Annual summits in Jerusalem became the program's signature event, bringing together a new cohort of 120 to 150 members each year for several days of workshops, networking, and plenary sessions with Israeli business, arts, and civic figures. Members received micro-grants to support their projects, access to the broader network, and ongoing programming between summits.

By its final years, the ROI Community had supported more than 1,700 members across more than 60 countries.^[2]

The program did not hold summits in 2014 (a sabbatical year), 2020, or 2021 (due to the COVID-19 pandemic). Its 2023 summit was limited to existing members.

ROI Community membership was explicitly designed to be ideologically broad. The program sought young Jewish leaders who were building new projects and institutions, regardless of their political or religious orientation. Members spanned the full spectrum of Jewish life and included figures whose views diverged sharply from each other and from the Foundation's own institutional positions.

The program operated as what it described as a big-tent initiative. Among its members were figures from across the political and ideological spectrum of Jewish life, including:

• Neshama Carlebach, singer and daughter of Shlomo Carlebach, who described herself as "a proud member of the ROI Community" at the 2011 Jewish Agency Assembly.^[3]
• Eli Valley, cartoonist known for satirical work critical of mainstream Jewish institutions and Israel advocacy organizations, whose ROI membership was cited by eJewish Philanthropy in 2009 as evidence of the program's ideological diversity.^[4]
• Daniel Sieradski, founder of Jewschool and a key organizer of Occupy Judaism, who received a ROI micro-grant for his "Jew It Yourself" project.^[5]
• Aaron Bisman, co-founder of JDub Records, the independent Jewish nonprofit music label that introduced Matisyahu and Balkan Beat Box to mainstream audiences. After JDub closed in 2012, Bisman served as Director of Brand, Sales, and Marketing at Jazz at Lincoln Center and later became SVP of Marketing at Sesame Workshop.^[6]
• Amichai Chikli, who joined ROI as the founder of the Tavor Leadership Academy and later served as Israel's Minister of Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.^[7]
• Dan Illouz, a Likud member of the Knesset born in Montreal, who joined ROI as a social entrepreneur before entering Israeli politics.^[8]
• Daphni Leef, who initiated the 2011 Israeli social justice protests that brought an estimated 400,000 people into the streets -- the largest demonstrations in Israeli history at the time.^[9]
• Cochav Elkayam-Levy, who joined ROI as a law student and later founded the Civil Commission on October 7th Crimes Against Women and Children, receiving the Israel Prize in 2025.^[10]
• Ethan Zohn, winner of Survivor: Africa and co-founder of Grassroot Soccer, which has provided HIV/AIDS education to more than 1.8 million young people in 50 countries.^[11]
• Noam Shuster-Eliassi, Israeli comedian and activist who grew up in the Israeli-Palestinian cooperative village Neve Shalom, performs in Hebrew, Arabic, and English, and has described herself as anti-Zionist. Her documentary Coexistence, My Ass! was shortlisted for the Academy Awards.^[12]
• Keren Elazari, cybersecurity analyst and the first Israeli woman to give a TED Talk, whose 2014 talk on hackers has been viewed more than 1.2 million times.^[13]
• Lacey Schwartz Delgado, documentary filmmaker and Second Lady of New York as the wife of Lieutenant Governor Antonio Delgado.^[14]
• Logan Ury, behavioral scientist, Director of Relationship Science at the dating app Hinge, and author of How to Not Die Alone (Simon & Schuster, 2021).^[15]
• Manny Waks, Australian activist who exposed child sexual abuse at Melbourne's Yeshivah College and testified at the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse.^[16]
• Micah Fitzerman-Blue, screenwriter of A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood and Transparent.^[17]
• Naftuli Moster, founder of Young Advocates for Fair Education (Yaffed), which campaigned for secular education standards in New York's Hasidic yeshivas, and named to the Forward 50 in 2015.^[18]
• Noy Alooshe, Israeli journalist and musician who created the "Zenga Zenga" viral parody of Muammar Gaddafi's speech in 2011, which became an anthem of the Libyan opposition.^[19]
• Rochelle Shoretz (1972-2015), Columbia Law School graduate who clerked for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and founded Sharsheret, a national Jewish breast cancer support organization, while undergoing chemotherapy at age 28.^[20]
• Sarah Glidden, cartoonist and author of Rolling Blackouts: Dispatches from Turkey, Syria, and Iraq, winner of the 2017 Lynd Ward Prize.^[21]
• Tamir Goodman, dubbed "the Jewish Jordan" by Sports Illustrated in 1999 and the first Orthodox Jewish athlete to play NCAA Division I basketball while wearing a kippah and observing the Sabbath.^[22]
• Yitz Jordan (Y-Love), described as the first openly gay Orthodox Jewish rapper, who raps in English, Hebrew, Yiddish, Arabic, Latin, and Aramaic.^[23]
• Yair Rosenberg, staff writer at The Atlantic covering the intersection of politics, culture, and religion, and author of the Deep Shtetl newsletter.^[24]

The network also connected organizations with each other. Ilja Sichrovsky, founder of the Muslim Jewish Conference, noted that ROI members had served as facilitators and participants at his annual interfaith conferences: "Over the years, Ilja has enlisted numerous ROIers to come work with him. In the latest conference some six ROIers worked as facilitators and dozens more were participants."^[25]

In October 2025, Schusterman Family Philanthropies announced it would close the ROI Community on July 1, 2026, after a final summit. The Foundation cited a desire to focus resources on direct grantmaking in the United States and Israel, particularly on combating antisemitism and anti-Zionism.^[26] The closure came under Stacy H. Schusterman, who succeeded her mother Lynn Schusterman as head of the foundation.

• Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies
• Birthright Israel
• PresenTense Group
• Jewish social entrepreneurship