Karla Van Praag, Executive Director
kvanpraag@jewishorganizing.org
Karla Van Praag recently became JOI’s Executive Director. Karla brings a wealth of experience to JOI, including five years working at Boston’s Jewish Community Relations Council, where she was Director of the Synagogue Social Justice Program, and then subsequently Director of Planning and Leadership Development. She further developed her nonprofit management and leadership skills, in areas including fundraising and communications, as the Deputy Director of the Somerville Community Corporation over the past two years. Karla has been trained as a community organizer and has worked with many JOI Fellows. She has strong connections in the Jewish social justice community. Karla holds a graduate degree from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, where she was a Public Service Fellow, and is a graduate of Wesleyan University.
Catherine Bell, Program Director
cbell@jewishorganizing.org
Catherine Bell began organizing in college when she started to connect her own experiences of finding her voice with those of women around her. She has been organizing in a Jewish context ever since her fellowship year with the Jewish Organizing Initiative (1999), when she ran an oral history of reproductive rights project for the Boston Chapter of NOW. Since then, she has worked as a youth organizer (within the Boston Jewish community and with immigrant youth in Brockton, MA), as an organizer of progressive Jewish adults in the Boston area and in New York City, and as an organizer at Temple Israel in Boston. She also spent time in Ghana as a HIV/AIDS educator as part of the Jewish Volunteer Corps of American Jewish World Service. Catherine graduated summa cum laude with a BA in English from Amherst College, and has a MA in Sociology of Education from the New York University School of Education.
Rebecca Herst, Operations Manager and Program Coordinator
rherst@jewishorganizing.org
Rebecca Herst is from Evanston, Illinois and graduated from Carleton College in 2006 with a degree in Political Science and International Relations. At Carleton she was involved in anti-racism work and was active in the Jewish Students at Carleton. She then came to Boston to learn to organize and to explore the connections between the social justice work she was doing and her Judaism. Rebecca also worked with teenagers as a Synagogue Organizer at the Jewish Community Relations Council. During her JOI fellowship year (2006-2007) she worked with the Women’s Institute for Leadership Development (WILD) an organization that works with women in the labor movement.
