M54 is inviting applications for its inaugural Shluchim Organizational Health Cohort (Shluchim Cohort 5).
The cohort is limited to 10 participants and will meet weekly for 12 Zoom sessions (1:00–2:30 PM EST — day of the week TBD). After approximately 4–5 Zoom sessions, participants will gather for a 3-day in-person retreat.
The cohort is scheduled to begin, iy”h, after Pesach, with specific dates to be announced.
Shluchim Organizational Health Cohort
Creating Capacity for Sacred Work
M54: The Institute for Insourcing is excited to launch its first Shluchim Organizational Health Cohort—and fifth overall Shluchim Cohort—bringing our proven pedagogy of Avoda Pnimis to the organizational challenges so many Shluchim face.
The Challenge You Recognize
You want to do deeper spiritual work, but organizational demands consumes your bandwidth. Every day brings crisis management, role confusion, and endless demands. When your mind spins with unresolved organizational problems, there is no space for meaningful inner engagement.
Chassidus teaches that being a Shliach should replenish your batteries and energize you. Feeling drained and burnt out is not supposed to be a byproduct of doing the Rebbe's work. Yet many Shluchim are experiencing exactly this exhaustion, stemming from organizational patterns that drain capacity rather than support sacred purpose.
What This Cohort Offers
This is not management training. This cohort gives you organizational language and skills that bring both energy and clarity to how you run your Chabad House. When organizational systems serve your sacred purpose rather than drain your capacity, you rediscover bandwidth for what matters most.
M54 has developed a pedagogy of Avoda Pnimis that helps people reconnect with their inner souls and live with energy and vitality from a place of agency. This pedagogy has deeply resonated with participants. However, organizational demands often get in the way of accessing this deeper spiritual work. This cohort provides the foundation for Avoda Pnimis from a place of calm and structure.
Making sure we are not burnt out and can do our work sustainably is critical. But that is not the same as making sure we have space for our internal work. Accessing our deeper spiritual worlds requires bandwidth, presence, and mental clarity that organizational chaos makes impossible. This cohort addresses both.
Who This Is For
Shluchim who recognize that their organizational struggles are not obstacles to spiritual work but the first arena where spiritual work must happen. Leaders who are ready to stop managing crises and start creating sustainable organizational health that serves sacred purpose.
The Experience
Format: 12 interactive sessions (90 minutes each, via Zoom) + 3 day in-person retreat
Duration: 5 months
Setting: Intimate cohort of fellow Shluchim
Approach: Combines organizational frameworks, experiential learning, peer consultation, and Chassidus
The Journey: We follow the Soular System framework of Noticing, Unpacking, and Doing.
Sessions 1 to 6: Learn organizational language and frameworks for understanding where chaos comes from and what creates clarity.
Retreat (3 days): Draw on core organizational principles to unpack the deeper dynamics at play in your Chabad House. Understand the patterns that keep you stuck, what they protect you from, and what they cost you.
Sessions 7 to 12: Develop strategies to test what you have learned. Create sustainable organizational systems through guided experimentation and peer accountability.
What You Will Learn
Organizational Clarity: Distinguish mission critical work from organizational maintenance, create clear role definitions and authority structures, and design boundaries that protect capacity without creating isolation.
Relational Transformation: Move from transactional interactions to transformational relationships using the Rambam's friendship model, lead from belief IN capacity rather than expectations OF outcomes, and navigate financial conversations without losing center.
Personal Agency: Understand where your wellbeing is located and practice the space between stimulus and response.
What Changes
Immediate Relief: You will experience mental bandwidth freed from constant crisis management, greater clarity about what is yours to do versus what belongs to others, reduced stress from unmet expectations and role confusion, and more energy at the end of each day.
Organizational Health: You will build sustainable systems that reduce chaos and support mission critical work, develop healthier relationships with spouse, staff, and community, allocate resources of time, energy, and money more effectively, and create clear decision making processes that reduce friction.
Spiritual Capacity: You will find space for reflection, learning, and deeper spiritual engagement, understand organizational health as itself an expression of spiritual work, establish foundation for eventual deeper Avoda Pnimis engagement, and develop presence and awareness as learnable skills, not just spiritual ideals.
Materials and Support
Each participant receives:
- The Overwhelm Diagnostic (baseline assessment completed before cohort begins)
- Digital workbook with frameworks and reflection prompts
- Access to organizational templates and tools
- Post cohort peer accountability guide
- Ongoing support through established peer partnerships
Ready to Create Space for What Matters Most?
This cohort is for Shluchim who are ready to address organizational patterns that drain rather than support sacred purpose. If you recognize that organizational health is not separate from spiritual work but creates the conditions where deeper inner work becomes accessible, this cohort is for you.
Next Cohort Begins: When ten qualified applicants enroll
Applications: On rolling basis
Investment: $2,000. The actual cost of the full program — including the 3-day retreat and 12 Zoom sessions — is $5,000. Thanks to donor partnership, M54 is able to subsidize the difference.
To learn more about M54 and view past cohort participants, visit www.m54.org.
For questions about this application, please reach out to peretz@chabadbrandeis.org.