“busy izzy” waxman is a

FOOD JUSTICE

Since 2018, she’s served community as Executive Director of MAZON Canada, the National Jewish Response to Hunger - a role that perfectly combines her love for Jewish community organizing, social justice and food.

In the last five years, she’s piloted Mazon through a significant period of change, growing the team, lay leadership, revenue, and, most importantly, impact – through the pandemic and the generational hunger crisis that has followed. In the first three years of her direction, alongside her Co-ED, Grant Goodman, Mazon’s support of the food aid sector through grants to front-line, grassroots programs grew from $350,000 to over $1 million, or 300,000 meals, annually. They have also launched new streams of impact, funding capacity-building food service and garden equipment, and systems-level organizing for the food justice sector, like research, conferences, and educational campaigns. She has personally managed the distribution of over $7.5 million to the food justice movement and food security sector in her time with Mazon.

She lectures at synagogues and panels on issues of philanthropy and food security, teaches at Jewish peer-learning events like Limmud and the MNJCC’s Tikkun Leil Shavuot on issues of Jewish ethics, and served as Congregation Darchei Noam's Social Justice Scholar in Residence from 2021-2023. She is a connector with relationships with progressive Jewish leaders, established and emerging, across Canada and the US.

SPIRITUAL LEADERSHIP

When she's not busy running campaigns and building relationships to feed vulnerable people, she loves to volunteer for political advocacy projects, cook ancestral recipes, and is currently learning to cartwheel. She is proudly and openly queer and neurodivergent, and seeks to make all the spaces she leads inclusive to people of all marginalizations.

Outside of her role at Mazon, she is passionate about Kabbalah and Jewish mysticism, and its intersection with psychedelics and Jewish magical practice. She teaches introductory-level Kabbalah and is currently seeking to run informal Kabbalah study nights that center the needs and voices of women and queers.

OTHER PROJECTS

lev, resource movement, mental health

EARLY CAREER, EDUCATION, PERSONAL LIFE

She holds a Bachelor’s in Liberal Arts with a focus on the anthropology of psychology, mental health and madness from Sarah Lawrence College in New York. After graduation, Izzy spent the first few years of her career as a fundraising trainer and recruiter at Public Outreach, as well as a Jewish educator at many Hebrew schools , including the Habonim Shul, the DJCC, and the Winchevsky Shule, and, notably, as Summer Director and Educational Director at Camp Gesher.

She is proudly and openly queer/bisexual and neurodivergent, and seeks to make all the spaces she leads inclusive to people of all marginalizations.

In her free time, she enjoys hosting dinner parties where she can cook lovingly for her ever-growing circle of friends.

AMBITIONS

She has many dreams of her future, and intends to tackle them on the scale of a lifetime:

to be a great ancestor;

to deeply nourish and grow the progressive Jewish community in Canada;

to see the face of G!d in every single person with whom she interacts
(and treat them accordingly).