Relationship-Based Engagement  

To Allie Conn Kanter, being an educator “by example” starts with knowing yourself and who you want to be to those you encounter. From hands-on engagement experience in campus work to her current work at Hadar, she understands how diverse the pathways can be to Jewish education. 

“Engagement” has been in nearly every one of Allie Conn Kanter’s titles since her first job at University of Michigan Hillel, and the Hillel model of relationship-based engagement is core to how she defines herself as an educator. 

Now serving as the senior director of programs and engagement at Hadar, Kanter entered the MA program in experiential education at the William Davidson Graduate School of Jewish Education in 2012 in order to professionalize the work she had been doing at Hillel and gain pedagogical skills and more background in studying Jewish text. “I wanted to be a Jewish educator by example, and I needed to boost my knowledge and skills to do that,” she said. 

To Kanter, being an educator “by example” starts with knowing yourself and who you want to be to those you encounter. She learned from her own experience as a student intern at Penn State Hillel that relationships are “part and parcel” of the learning experience. Kanter sees being an educator as a mode, a professional identity that requires you to put yourself in direct relationship with those you seek to engage. 

Kanter’s own career journey in engagement took root as an undergraduate at Penn State. Having grown up in a vibrant Conservative community in the Philadelphia area, Kanter attended public school and was active in Jewish life through programs like USY and the Alexander Muss High School in Israel. At the time Penn State was not known for a strong Jewish life, and Kanter forged her own personal path to keeping Judaism relevant to her life, choosing to keep kosher and opting to study abroad at Tel Aviv University.  

Building on her “Big Ten” roots, after graduation Kanter accepted a position as a Berman Fellow at the University of Michigan Hillel. It was during a period of leadership transition at Hillel, and Kanter took on considerable responsibilities. “I was punching outside my weight class and learning a lot on the job,” Kanter recalled. She discovered that she truly enjoyed engagement work in the context of a vibrant Jewish community. From Michigan she moved to New York to attend Davidson. 

One of the most significant parts of Kanter’s Davidson experience was her semester in Israel as part of the Kesher Hadash seminar led by Dr. Alex Sinclair, which drew students from across Davidson’s tracks. “This was a very intense semester where a small group of us were grappling with our own Jewish journey, relationship to Israel, and personal Jewish practice,” she said. For Kanter, who remains close with the members of her group, it was the opportunity to truly ask herself what it meant to become a Jewish educator. 

Each student in Kesher Hadash took on a project, and Kanter chose to study the Nava Tehila singing prayer community in Jerusalem. “I have always been drawn to music and found it very accessible,” she said. Kanter approached the leaders of Nava Tehila intending to study the group and soon found herself drawn in to join the community. “My way in was in ‘educator mode’,” she said, “and it was this pathway that helped me truly grasp what that meant to my professional identity development.” 

Kanter created a short video about Nava Tehila’s mission and community and, in the process, understood how important creating relationships was to becoming the kind of educator she intended to be. Becoming part of Nava Tehila’s Levite Circle, Kanter understood the impact being an educator has on the identity of the educator. 

After Davidson, Kanter returned to campus work as director of engagement at Columbia/Barnard Hillel where she was able to test out the skills she gained in graduate school. “Whatever program or project I was working on, it was in relationship with students,” Kanter said. Hillel work bends to the interests of students, and Kanter loved the 1:1 work with students. 

In her current role at Hadar, where she has worked for the past eight years, Kanter oversees program and engagement and brought these two teams together in recognition of how interdependent they are. “Hadar is an institution with a clear religious vision—we create opportunities for people to learn and observe mitzvot,” Kanter said. Alongside the faculty at Hadar who put text and religious practice at the center, Kanter ensures that everything Hadar does connects meaningfully to people wherever they are. 

Kanter uses the term “audience arcs” to describe the diverse ways people engage with Hadar. “A big part of my role is to understand the very diverse pathways people take to Hadar and to ensure that my team is prepared to meet these people wherever they are on their individual pathway,” she said. She and her team are always considering demographics and how to best and most intentionally engage people with Hadar’s mission at different points throughout the year.  

Having “engagement” in her title might seem like a more refined term than “marketing,” but to Kanter there is a substantial difference. While “marketing” might cover the activities it takes to bring people into a space, “engagement” speaks to the relationships that make Hadar a place where people feel at home, and comfortable accessing Torah, according to Kanter. 

Kanter’s commitment to engagement—perhaps the part of her that will always remain a Hillel professional—extends to her role in supervision and team management. Mentorship animates Kanter, and she embraces “relational supervision,” the concept that access to any kind of on-the-job learning—perhaps especially Jewish education—depends on human connection and understanding. As a fellow in the Mandel Institute’s Executive Leadership Program, Kanter actually delivered a capstone project on the topic of relational supervision. 

“I love where I work because learning is taken seriously both for the participants and for us personally,” said Kanter. “As an educator I am driven by a need to be constantly learning, and I feel very lucky to work at an organization—and across the wider Jewish landscape–with like-minded educators and learners.”