Young Jewish Innovators To Attend Jerusalem Tikkun Olam Summit
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(JTA) — A Swiss activist preventing malaria, a British gay civil servant advancing Brexit and a Greek tool guru are among 150 participants of a Jerusalem conference for Jewish innovators.
The participants are slated to convene in the Israeli capital on June 24 for the ROI Summit — a week-long seminar on engagement by Jews in their 20s and 30s in innovative projects with the potential of benefiting society. An annual event that began in 2005, the ROI Summit is celebrating this year its bar mitvah, or 13th anniversary, organizers said.
Adina Rom from Zurich will be showcasing TamTam Africa, a nonprofit that she started and which provides mosquito nets to families in Sub-Saharan Africa to protect them from malaria.
Elliot Jebreel, a civil servant working on Britain’s exit from the European Union, will be presenting his struggles to “find his place” as a gay Jew of Persian descent in British society and the Jewish community, he said. He has successfully pushed for greater representation for people like him at the Board of Deputies of British Jews.
And Ilias Saltiel, an engineer from Greece, will be explaining about his brainchild called Athens Makerspace — a nonprofit giving professionals and amateurs access to tools they need to realize feasible technical projects.
The 150 participants at the ROI conference, which is an initiative of the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation, hail from 29 countries, including Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Chile, Serbia, Turkey and the United States. They belong to the ROI Community, which is an international network of innovators and incubator for social change ventures. Members of the ROI Summit must share the value of tikkun olam — Hebrew for “repairing the world,” the initiative’s website says.
Contact Haley Cohen at [email protected]
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