Rachel Howe is dedicated to community service through her job as a grant specialist for the Defender Association of Philadelphia and countless volunteering hours at Society Hill Synagogue in Center City.
The South Philadelphia resident is also a board member of 3GPhilly, an organization for Holocaust remembrance and education centered around the grandchildren of Holocaust survivors.
At her synagogue, Howe founded and is heavily involved in a Rosh Chodesh program, a monthly gathering for Jewish women to celebrate the new Hebrew month, marked by the new moon, through spirituality and learning.
What is the Defender’s Association and how does your role fit into their work?
A lot of public defender’s offices are part of the county or the city, but we are a stand-alone nonprofit. It’s been around since the 1930s, and I write grants, grant applications, reach out and make connections to philanthropy, and once we get the grants, I manage them in terms of making sure that the people are doing the things that they said they would do in the grant, that the money is being used appropriately, and that we’re spending it down and communicating that back reporting to the funder.
What got you interested in that profession?
I have published several short stories and poems and a few essays. I have a master’s degree in creative writing from Temple University, and so I guess it’s not surprising that I would end up in grant writing. One thing I’ll say about my current job is that one thing I really enjoy is helping people put together programs and really think through the details of how it’s going to be implemented.
I was at Temple University for graduate school and I became involved in a lot of community-based work that the university was doing. It started out where I was doing creative writing workshops with kids in the middle school nearby, and working with the students who were training to become English teachers. … And then I got into grant writing for Temple University from there, and then did a lot of criminal justice work as part of some of the projects that Temple was doing.
How did you start the Rosh Chodesh program and gauge interest?
I volunteer a lot in the synagogue. I’m very involved. I must be on like six committees and volunteer as a greeter, and it’s a very social synagogue. I really love that about it. I talked to a lot of people, and kind of just brought it up.
I just sort of talked to different women. I got the idea from a friend who I work with at 3GPhilly, another board member, and she was running those as part of her job. … [Eventually] we put together a formal proposal about what it should look like, how who could be involved, when we would meet, how often would it be by Zoom, in person, like all of those things. And then we submitted that to the synagogue board.
Your professional and volunteer work is centered around the community. Why is that so important to you?
I do feel like a lot of the work that I do professionally, while I get paid for it, it feels like I am contributing to the broader community. … Most of that community work that I’ve done has been very specifically contributing to the African American and Latino community, to the underserved parts of Philadelphia.
Jewish identity has always been a central part of who I am, and much more so as I’ve gotten older, and especially having had children, it’s such a fundamental part of who I am. And I would say it is those Jewish values that cause me to do that community-based work, professionally.
What made you interested in becoming involved with 3GPhilly?
Being the grandchild of Holocaust survivors is such a deep part of who I am. All of this work feels, I guess, very self-centered in a way, even though I feel like it contributes to the Jewish community. It’s all things that I really wanted more of in my life.
I wanted to be talking to other grandchildren of survivors and have that community and be able to be in groups with those people to honor our grandparents’ legacy and to talk about what that experience has been like, and to remember our grandparents together.