This Is Ours

Join us in THIS IS OURS, a year-end campaign to support SVARA’s growth.

GIVE NOW!

Your support makes it possible for us to live into olam haba (the world we wish to see) every time we gather in the bet midrash. Through THIS IS OURS we are focusing on three areas of our work that embody our yeshiva’s values and commitments:

  • Financial Chevrutaship: We offer all our learning spaces with a sliding-scale model that ensures our offerings work for anyone, regardless of financial background. This year, the majority of our learning community selected tuition rates below the true cost of running our programs. Becoming a financial chevruta helps ensure that SVARA Torah is available to anyone who wants to learn it.
  • Leadership of Queer Black & JOC Teachers: Through our Scholar-in-Residence program and our Teaching Kollel we are committed to learning from, and lifting up the voices of, queer Black and JOC teachers in and outside of SVARA’s community. As part of our commitment to reparations, we offer tuition-free participation in our teacher-training programs for Black trainees. We welcome white SVARA-niks to support this work and help us nurture and uplift the leadership of Black teachers in our community.
  • Expanding Access for Learning at SVARA: There are so many ways to learn with SVARA and we’re committed to offering a range of drop-in spaces from the daily Mishnah Collective to skills-based workshops and community events. These offerings are free of charge (though they are not actually free to run!) as part of our commitment to expand learning to anyone who wants to access it.

Our goal for this campaign is to raise $18,000. Gifts of any amount are welcome, and you can make a one-time contribution or become a monthly sustainer.

GIVE NOW

Feeling inspired to bring others into the SVARA magic? Create your own Facebook fundraiser following these easy steps:

Host a Facebook fundraiser for SVARA

Please share the magic of SVARA with your fam—y’all know we mean all fam: your comrades, your bubbe, your teachers and mentors, your dates, your rabbis, and more, by setting up a simple fundraiser on Facebook and sharing the post below.

  1. Log onto Facebook

  2. On the left, click fundraiser heart coin Fundraisers.

  3. Click “select nonprofit” then SVARA

  4. Edit your goal (average successful goal: $250)

  5. Share a few sentences with your community about what SVARA means to you. If you don’t feel like writing your own thing, change the default text to this:

SVARA is an organization dedicated to raising up a generation of queer and trans Jews and empowering them to become leaders, teachers, and shapers of a more just, healed, and equitable world. In 2021, SVARA reached over 10,000 people. Our programs include various daily and weekly online learning that enable people to interact with a more liberatory model of Judaism—from classes on topics like reparations and repair to a daily, drop-in, intergenerational, and queer-normative space.

Today, we are fundraising to lift up the leadership of queer Black and JOC teachers through our Scholar-in-Residence and Teaching Kollel, to sustain our free offerings including skill-building workshops, community events, and Mishnah Collective, our daily, drop-in space, and to grow our financial chevrutaship model that supports learners who are unable to pay the true cost of our programs and offerings.

  1. Here are some sweet SVARA photos you can use as your background.

We’re grateful for your partnership and look forward to all the expansive and liberatory insights that y’all bring to our yeshiva each and every day!