By Leah Spellberg
As a fellow on the Nachshon Project, I aspire to one day be a leader in the Jewish community. My challenge, however, is learning what type of leader I want to be, and what kind of change I want to make in the world. After meeting new fascinating innovators and educators every week, I often leave sessions with the feeling of “Wow, I love what you are doing!” but something hit me different with Laura Solomon. After speaking with her I really felt “I love what you are doing and I want to do it too!”.
Laura Solomon is a lawyer that started out her career knowing that she wanted to help people. Currently she runs a firm that solely represents non-profits, so that she can do what she loves by practicing law but also doing good in the world. She not only understands Jewish values of giving to others and uses it in her work, but she understands the importance and value in being successful and making money.
She spoke about many clients that she works with who categorize themselves as Social Entrepreneurs. This means that they are companies who run like a business, with the main goal of making money, while at the same time finding solutions to social, cultural, and environmental problems. While I do love to study Jewish values and put them into context in the world, I am also a very mathematical and reasonable person. This may be the reason that I felt like Laura was so relatable. She didn’t pretend like you had to choose between being successful and doing good in the world, they can actually go hand in hand. She also spoke about the difference between running your own non-profit, like being a CEO, versus working with so many different ones as she does. I really enjoyed hearing her speak about helping many people at once instead of just one cause.
At this moment in my life I don’t feel like I have that one big idea to go out and start my own non-profit, but I do have a passion for so many different things and being able to see how Laura established this in her firm gives me hope that one day I will find a way to put all of my passions and talents together to become a leader.
