Youth foundations bring together teens interested in learning about philanthropy from a Jewish perspective. Teens contribute money to a collective philanthropic pool, and then these funds are leveraged through a match provided by a local donor.  At the end of the process, the teens donate the collected funds to organizations of their choice.

Examples of Youth Foundations:

• The Jewish Youth Philanthropy Institute of Greater Washington
  A program of the Partnership for Jewish Life and Learning (a central education agency), that operates youth programs for high school age teens  in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area.  JYPI also serves as a national resource and a model by providing workshops, technical assistance and curricula materials to other communities seeking to implement youth philanthropy initiatives.
  

• Jewish Community Foundation of San Diego
  The Community Youth Foundation encourages young people aged 13-15 to become philanthropists by empowering them with skills to give effectively. Since establishment in 1997, the program has involved more than 223 students from different denominations and affiliations throughout the region.  Their complete how-to manual can be found here.

• No Small Change, a project of Ma'yan, the Jewish Women's Project of the JCC in Manhattan
  No Small Change: A Tzedakah Collective for Women and Teenage Girls, was designed to be an environment for the exploration of issues surrounding money, gender, social change, leadership, community and philanthropy.  The link above documents their first year of operation.

Seventh grade funds, typically run by day schools or supplemental religious schools, engage teens during their Bar/Bat Mitzvah year. Rather than exchanging gifts with each other for their B’nai Mitzvah celebrations, the teens contribute the money they would have spent on gifts to support issues close to their hearts.

An example of a Seventh Grade Fund:

Tzedakah in Action
Tzedakah in Action is the name of the Temple Isaiah Seventh Grade Fund, the Jewish Youth Foundation of Temple Isaiah in Lafayette, California. Since 1998, the Temple Isaiah Seventh Grade Fund has awarded nearly $75,000 to 18 different non-profit organizations. The description above is part of a larger document called "Tzedakah in Action: A Teacher's Guide to Creating and Managing Jewish Youth Foundations".

A community foundation invites teens to sit on a youth board and make decisions about where to allocate a portion of its funds. While the funds are not usually collected directly from the teens, the teens do make the decisions about where this money is granted.

An Example of a Youth Board:

Rose Youth Foundation
A Foundation for youth in grades 9 through 12 from all types of Jewish backgrounds, from all parts of metro Denver, from different educational systems, and from all different kinds of families. It provides an opportunity for Jewish teens to get involved--to meet new people, to learn about and practice the Jewish traditions of tikkun olam and tzedakah, and to learn about responsible grantmaking by deciding how to give away $50,000 in grants to Denver-area organizations. Below is an excerpt from "Jewish Youth Philanthropy: What Teens Need to Know," by Lisa Farber Miller, Senior Program Officer, Rose Community Foundation.

Individual endowment funds enable teens to create endowments in their own names.   The fund advisors collect funds from the teens, which are often matched by outside funds.  At the end of each year, the teens are able to donate the interest earned on their accounts to organizations of their choice.