(JTA) — A Swiss activist preventing malaria, a British gay civil servant advancing Brexit and a Greek tool guru are among 150 participants in a Jerusalem conference for Jewish innovators.
The participants are slated to convene in the Israeli capital on June 24 for the ROI Summit, a weeklong seminar on engagement by Jews in their 20s and 30s in innovative projects. An annual event that began in 2005, the ROI Summit is celebrating its bar mitzvah year, or 13th anniversary, organizers said.
Adina Rom of Zurich will be showcasing TamTam Africa, a nonprofit she started that provides mosquito nets to families in sub-Saharan Africa to protect them from malaria.
Elliot Jebreel, s 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. Jebree; 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, 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.
No’a Gorlin, the ROI Community’s associate executive director, said the Israel conference is her group’s “flagship event,” allowing members of the network interact to gain “a heightened sense of intention, belonging and responsibility” as they “pursue social change in the Jewish community and beyond.”
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