Future is April 17 at youth foundation’s annual dinner

By Jewish Review

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The topic will be the future and the message will be that the future is now when the Oregon Jewish Community Youth Foundation hosts its annual dinner April 17 at the Mittleman Jewish Community Center.

The OJCYF was established within the Oregon Jewish Community Foundation to perpetuate, in its own words, “the promise and values of our peoplehood…by engaging teens in philanthropy, citizenship and leadership training.”

Each year, the teenage members of the youth foundation raise money, assess communal needs and allocate the funds they raised to the agencies and other causes they have chosen.

Last year, the OJCYF awarded $47,500 in community grants.

This year, when banquet goers gather at the MJCC ballroom for what is a benefit event for the Youth Foundation, the group’s young leaders will share, in a PowerPoint presentation of their making, their views of this community’s needs now and the consequences of decisions that may be made now.

By considering how current local and world circumstances may evolve, and by spelling out various choices that the Jewish community can make now, they will paint scenarios of what Portland’s Jewish community might look like at various mileposts in their own lives as they move through adulthood here, when they become 30 and 40 and 50 years old.

Their message will be that the future they and their community will encounter depends in large part on choices that community makes now, or, in their words, “the future is now.”

The youth foundation members also will present a movie recounting their years with the OJCYF and how it has impacted their lives and their Jewish identity.

The dinner will be catered by Allen Levin.

Tickets for the 5:30 p.m. event are $75 for adults and $50 for youths middle-school age and above, and may be ordered online at ojcf.org or by phone at 503-248-9328.