Jesse Lenn: A champion for community education

In 2017, you co-founded the non-profit, Youth Holocaust Education And Remembrance (HEAR), which aims to reduce hate by connecting young Australians with the memory of the Holocaust. How did this come about?

It was a long time ago now. There was a similar idea that existed already in Melbourne, along the lines of a ‘young friends of the Holocaust Museum’ group.

I was talking with a friend who knew someone involved in that group, and we realised there was a huge gap in the Sydney community. We got more friends together and started investigating further. It was in conversation with the Sydney Jewish Museum that we quickly confirmed there was a lack of a space for young adults that both commemorated the Holocaust and improved education and awareness around the topic.

That need was immediately proven in the first Youth HEAR event we put on, where, without any marketing, we had 80 young adults in a room hearing from Holocaust survivors. It really grew from there – lots of people were attracted to the idea, and wanted to get involved and volunteer their time.

I think it came down to being a great cause that lots of people believed in. We also based a lot of our work off the Gen17 survey results, which found people are connecting to their Judaism through the memory of the Holocaust.

Do you have Holocaust ancestry yourself?

Yes, on my mum’s side. Both of her parents were in the Holocaust.

What was your role within Youth HEAR?

Initially there were five co-founders, and we all became directors. We all volunteered, and it was very hands-on. We filled out committees and sub-committees, and managed a team of about 30 volunteers. We decided the strategic direction of the organisation, how it would grow, who we would partner with and what we wanted to do long-term.

I was involved in that capacity from the beginning for three years. For a lot of us, our goal was to get the organisation to a place where it could exist without us and could be sustainable. By the time I left, there were enough people on board, so it wasn’t totally reliant on the core founders. There were other factors as well, some people started full-time work, others, like me, moved away for a few months. We felt it was time to step back and bring new blood into the organisation and its directorship.

That’s an incredible feat to get the organisation to that point in just three years.

It was great. We put in a lot of time, energy and effort, and we had great people in the community who were eager to get involved and volunteer, and important donors getting behind the cause as well.

We believed the service we were delivering was high quality and momentum just built. Our first Yom HaShoah event had about 400 young adults – I remember having to scramble to get extra chairs into the room. We were running around trying to make as many rows as possible, but people were still standing. It was mind blowing to experience.

I think what was attractive to people was this idea that Youth HEAR was built by young adults for young adults. We understood that no one wanted to sit for three hours for a traditional Yom HaShoah event that’s typically tailored towards an older demographic. We knew young people wanted to commemorate but didn’t want it to take a whole day away from them.

We were very deliberate in our offering. Our events were shorter, more interactive and ran on time, which is so important for young people. We just had a great understanding of what young people wanted to get out of any event or commemoration.

There’s the saying, if you build it, they will come – and they came.

After you left Youth HEAR, you co-founded another Jewish organisation, Community Health Support in 2021. What does this initiative aim to achieve?

After I finished my master’s degree at the University of Technology Sydney, I practiced as a physiotherapist in the public hospital system and in private practice. This sets the backdrop for founding Community Health Support and becoming its Executive Director. Our mission is to empower our community with confidence in a medical emergency.

Most importantly, we provide a 24/7 emergency medical response and advice line. Community members can call us, get a professional opinion and/or have one of our doctors, nurses, paramedics, allied health professionals and advanced first responders come out and assist them. If an ambulance is required, we will also organise that.

We also run first aid and CPR training for community members and organisations. We provide first aid and equipment consulting to all the schools and shules, and we provide medical event coverage to higher risk or major community events, which means we’re on standby if a medical incident takes place.

How do Australians fare when it comes to our first aid knowledge?

I believe that we've tapped into a significant market, not just in the Jewish community, but within the wider Australian community.

The stat out of the Australian Red Cross is that less than 5% of all Australians are effectively trained to deal with a medical emergency. Australia has some of the lowest rates of first aid training in the world. It's a nationwide problem, but we're proud that 99% of attendees who come out of our first aid courses feel like they would be able to help in a medical emergency as a direct result of our training.

It's been a journey, but we’re now sitting at close to 3,000 community members who have been directly trained by our organisation in first aid and CPR, which will have such a big ripple effect.

Do you think first responders get enough support in our community?

I’ve been very involved with the Community Security Group (CSG) NSW for the past 10 years, and worked for three years as a community first responder.

It's a very interesting and unique role that first responders fill. I'm not talking about people who are in paid roles, such as paramedics, because they can also be considered first responders in a general term. I'm talking community first responders, people who are embedded in the community, who are often volunteering their time towards a cause – in our case being medical emergencies.

It's a tough gig mentally, because your phone could ring at any moment, and there could be someone five doors down from you who's having a cardiac arrest. It takes its toll on people, especially when you're a volunteer and it's not your day job, it’s not what you do day in and day out, and maybe you have to care for your family or parents. I have so much respect for them.

I think all the first responders that we have on board at Community Health Support get enough support. We've got various mechanisms in place to support them, but it's a tough gig. Sometimes they go out to daunting medical emergencies, but everyone does it for the same cause, which is to empower our community during that time, because without it, they feel helpless. I think we’re making a real difference.

What's the biggest lesson you’ve learned during your time as a first responder?

The biggest lesson is understanding that there's two key ways that a community first responder can make an impact. The first one is the obvious, which is making a clinical difference and positive health outcome to the patient. For example, if you're first on scene and you start CPR and get a defibrillator on, that's going to make a huge difference if an ambulance is still five or six minutes away.

The second moves away from the clinical and is about the benefit of supporting the welfare of community members. We get many cases where an elderly person that perhaps lives alone has fallen and it is low risk for the ambulance, so you arrive on the scene 20 or 30 minutes before them. It makes a huge difference and provides so much value to that community member to have someone who's in the community that they feel comfortable with to support them. I’ve come to understand the real value of that over many years of arriving to that exact scene.

How important is the role of community in your life and work?

It’s so important. Specifically within our Jewish community, it’s knowing that everyone has each other's backs, and I feel that’s particularly important at Community Health Support. That's really what it's all about, that we're all supporting one another when things don't go the way they necessarily should.

Did you always think you would end up working in and for the Jewish community?

I grew up in Maroubra, which these days has a growing Jewish community. I went to Mount Sinai College in primary school, and then I went to Moriah College for the rest of my high school. I wasn't so involved in any youth movements, but I was heavily involved with the likes of Maccabi and Hakoah through sport. That provided a significant connection for me to the Jewish community.

Post school, I got very heavily involved in several Jewish organisations and programs, including Maccabi, Jewish Care NSW, Community Security Group, and Bnei Akiva. I went back to Moriah and volunteered to take a cohort of year 10 students to Israel and helped on their Counterpart for a number of years. After school was really where I started to get embedded within the Jewish community and all it has to offer.

I was naturally in a place where I was giving a huge amount of time to the community through volunteering. Now, my day job is also within the community and within the health space, which I was already passionate about. It’s married everything up quietly nicely for me.

I've been able to give back to the Jewish community on a daily basis, and continue and utilise all of the connections I have built to the benefit of my organisation and therefore, to the benefit of my community.

How has the Jewish community supported you across both of your endeavours?

There's been a huge amount of support from across the Jewish community.

This idea of philanthropy, for me, is shown in different ways. There are people volunteering and giving their time, there is the financial support and there is networking. It's been incredibly valued by everyone involved in both organisations, including our volunteers, board members and of course, myself.

Honestly, without the Jewish community, neither organisation would be alive today.