Direct support is the most visible way a business owner supports a cause, but it is rarely the only one. Uri Poliavich, who pairs his business career with backing for education, counts his professional experience as something he can give as well. In practice, that means mentoring people, passing on what he knows, helping set priorities, and planning how an organization runs. A community project that gets this kind of help usually directs its efforts with more focus and also builds its capacity over time. For Uri Poliavich, the people who bring hands-on experience to a project matter as much as the scale of the support behind it.
Mentorship as a Form of Social Contribution
A mentor gives someone who is building a project access to experience they can draw on. Sometimes that means a candid look at an idea before it launches. Other times it helps rank priorities. The person being mentored still decides what to do next, and the mentor’s job is to make that decision better informed. Uri Poliavich’s view of leadership works the same way, with support offered when it’s needed and plenty of room to decide.
Uri Poliavich sums up a leader’s job as picking the right people, standing behind them when they need it, and giving them the freedom to create. Carried over into mentoring, that turns into a few concrete habits: pointing out where an idea is strongest, flagging something the founder may have missed, and sharing how a similar situation played out before. The decision itself stays with whoever is running the project. That way the mentor’s knowledge gets used, but nobody ends up running their project on someone else’s terms.
Passing On Professional Experience and Knowledge
Uri Poliavich’s professional experience covers more than knowledge of markets or products; it also includes practical ways of organizing work. The ability to set priorities, coordinate a team, and make decisions based on available capacity can be valuable for community organizations as well. When it comes to social responsibility, Uri Poliavich sees business experience as a resource whose value reaches beyond commercial activity. Sharing it lets other teams use approaches that have already been worked out and adapt them to the goals of their own initiatives.
A separate part of that professional experience is how decisions get made. In practice, Uri Poliavich starts with a short round of questions, then analyzes the strengths of the proposed solution and weighs the available facts. This sequence helps structure the discussion and keeps the choice from dragging on. For community organizations, this experience can be useful when setting priorities across several projects or allocating limited capacity. Passing on management practices like these is another way an entrepreneur can contribute to society alongside direct support.
Openness to new ideas is also part of Uri Poliavich’s professional approach. In his business work, he pays attention to finding people with unconventional proposals who are ready to suggest new solutions. For community initiatives, this principle can mean bringing specialists with different backgrounds into discussions about goals and how to reach them. In this format, sharing knowledge isn’t limited to advice from an experienced leader: the people working together can add their own ideas to that hands-on experience.
Supporting Educational Opportunities
Meeting a school’s basic needs keeps the doors open, but a good school also needs a clear learning plan, teachers who work in sync, and someone paying attention to what each group of children actually needs. Jewish education has become one of the main causes Uri Poliavich supports. In 2020, Uri Poliavich co-founded the Yael Foundation to direct support to schools and programs in many countries at once. The foundation supports 145 institutions in 48 countries, and its educational programs reach more than 29,000 children. For Uri Poliavich, that work draws on the same organizing skills he uses in business.
Uri Poliavich’s professional experience can be useful for educational initiatives in several areas:
- Defining educational needs. Analyzing which learning opportunities children in a particular community need and what the relevant programs should accomplish.
- Evaluating results. Setting the indicators used to assess access to learning, how many children are reached, and whether educational goals are met.
These areas show how knowledge and organizational skills add to support. For Uri Poliavich, education is where these skills have the most direct use: the foundation works with kindergartens and schools at different stages of learning and in communities with different needs. Running programs at this scale calls for clear priorities, coordinated specialists, and a shared way of tracking progress. That’s why Uri Poliavich treats education as a concrete area where an entrepreneur’s experience works alongside the support he provides.
Strategic Planning and Resource Allocation in Charitable Initiatives
Planning is the part of business experience that a charity cannot simply acquire. In Uri Poliavich’s work, it covers how tasks are organized, which priorities come first, and how available capacity is directed. An international education program makes this concrete: one school may need more staff while another needs a longer school day, and a single plan has to make room for both. Uri Poliavich’s management background helps treat each decision as one line in a larger plan for the program and not as a stand-alone choice.
Every charity has more good uses for its capacity than it can cover at once. An education organization has to weigh what its schools need today, what it takes to keep programs running, and what it would take to grow them. A person who has run a company is used to making that kind of call and setting an order of steps. For Uri Poliavich, this management know-how is a contribution in its own right, separate from the support he provides.
Uri Poliavich describes the link between entrepreneurship and philanthropy in a way many people don’t expect. The usual assumption is that business backs charity; in his view, charity is what pushes the business forward. Seen like that, social work becomes a line of work in its own right that deserves the same planning and attention as any part of the company. Planning then becomes the tool that ties available capacity to what each program is trying to achieve.