Neely Tal Snyder Community Impact Award
This award honors the memory of Neely Tal Snyder z”l by recognizing a professional with strong commitment and passion for Jewish community. The winner of this award demonstrates creativity, openness and inclusion and helps to build immersive and hands-on experiences/programs that have community impact.
Click here to view previous winners of the Neely Tal Snyder Community Impact Award.
Neely Snyder was a committed and passionate Jewish professional; she was able to connect, engage and inspire all who knew her and worked with her. Neely had a particular ability to create experiences, oftentimes immersive and hands-on, that helped build connections to self and to the larger community. She had a commitment to inclusion and openness that helped to define the community she wished to create. She was a risk-taker and launched new programs and ideas that bent the arc of the Jewish community toward justice, integrity and authenticity. Recipients of the Neely Tal Snyder Community Impact Award have been involved with programs/projects that speak to this advancement of the Jewish community and have demonstrated their ability to impact the community, either as an individual or through the specific program. Programs/projects that the nominee has worked on can demonstrate a new modality for the community in terms of service delivery, can serve an unmet need, can have a demonstrated level of impact or can continue to push the Jewish community toward openness and inclusion. Nominees should also share some of the attributes that Neely represented in her life and her profession.
Sara Shalva
Center for Arts & Culture , Jewish Community Center
Sara is a dynamic professional committed to developing programs and experiences that welcome all in our Baltimore Jewish Community. Sara founded the Jewish Queer Arts Festival in June 2021, now back for its third year. Sara has formed partnerships with synagogues and organizations to ensure the Jewish Queer community feels welcomed in Baltimore.
This past February, Sara designed our first ever Take a Leap 2023: Celebrating Black History Dance Month. In partnership with the Baltimore Black Dance Collective, Sara curated a month-long celebration of Black Dance in America, where classes, workshops, and performances were held throughout the month. On February 7th and 8th, nearly 900 students from Middle & High Schools at Baltimore County Public Schools experienced field trips to the Gordon Center. This month-long experience demonstrated the JCC’s commitment to our growing Black membership and users, as well as for Jews of Color.
Sara is pioneering an agency-wide approach to ensure the black community knows how committed the JCC is to creating a welcoming environment and a higher sense of belonging and connectedness to the Jewish community.
Sara is a designer and community builder. Sara has also redesigned our Jewish family engagement programs, now called J Life, to meet the needs of diverse young Jewish families. Sara ensures the staff she supervises and inspires develops experiences that welcome all types of Jewish families including multi-racial, LGTBQIA+, and interfaith. Each program is built on partnerships with many local synagogues, Jewish organizations, and secular institutions committed to advancing our mission. Under Sara’s leadership these past 3 years, the programming and partnerships in our Center for Arts & Culture has advanced impressively. Sara defines a professional who can inspire others, and who increases a sense of belonging in Jewish Baltimore.
Sara is deeply committed to innovation and clearly demonstrates creativity, imagination, and inspires others to provide a “pathway to strengthening Jewish identity”.
Past Award Winners
Rachel Siegal
The Pearlstone Center, 2016
Molly Amster
Jews United for Justice, 2017
Sara Rubinstein
The Jewish Community Center of Greater Baltimore, 2018
Ashley Pressman
Jewish Volunteer Connection, 2019
Lisa Bodziner
Towson Hillel, 2021
Rachel Turniansky
Macks Center for Jewish Education, 2022
Sara Shalva
Jewish Community Center, 2023
