A student-designed Shabbat dinner program that started as a research project at UVM and became one of the largest events on campus. Six years later, it's still running — with its own farm plot, its own leadership pipeline, and 1,600 students co-hosting meals each year.
Who We Worked With
UVM Hillel, Springboard Fellowship
Partners
Frankie Day-Lyon
Services
Research & Strategy, Product & Experience
Project Fun Fact
1/14th the cost of comparable programs at other top-performing Hillels
A Shabbat experience that thousands of students built themselves — and never stopped building.
UVM Hillel had a problem: they were reaching a third of their students, and the other two-thirds weren’t walking through the door.
The usual instinct would be to host bigger, louder events inside the building. We went the other direction. We recruited a cross-section of students — including the ones who had actively walked away from Hillel — trained them in human-centered design, and spent two months interviewing everyone from weekly regulars to students who refused to set foot inside the building.
What we found: students wanted to celebrate Shabbat, but on their own terms, with their own friends, in their own homes. They didn’t want to attend a program. They wanted to build something.
So we created Hillel Fresh: a Shabbat experience kit delivered to students’ doors with everything they needed to cook and host their own dinner for as many people as they wanted — Jewish or not. Each kit came with locally sourced, plant-based recipes, ritual guides designed to be meaningful for people of every background, and custom wall art commissioned for each meal.
The students didn’t just participate. They became the builders. Most hosts continued leading Shabbats on their own between program runs — without any resources from us. That’s the signal we were looking for: not engagement, but ownership.
The first Hillel Fresh prototypes became UVM Hillel’s largest event of Spring 2019. By 2020, a single run exceeded the combined size of all five 2019 prototypes by 50%. Two years after we fully transferred the project to student leaders, it kept growing. In Spring 2021, 1,600 students co-hosted a Hillel Fresh and 2,000 received food from the student-built Hillel Farm.
Today, six years later, Hillel Fresh is still running — with its own farm plot, its own student leadership pipeline, and a cost structure 1/14th that of comparable programs at other top-performing Hillels.
The best design doesn’t give people an experience. It gives them ownership.
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