By Joel Magalnick, Editor, JTNews
Click to see this year’s allocations
When the directors of local Jewish organizations opened up their email inboxes on June 17, most received a pleasant surprise: For the first time in three years their allocations from the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle’s annual community campaign had gone up. In some cases, the increase was significant.
“We made some strategic decisions within the Federation budget this past year, and that allowed us to put more money into the allocations system,” said Richard Fruchter, the Federation’s president and CEO.
In addition, with a reduction and shift in the way it pays dues to its umbrella organization, Jewish Federations of North America, the Seattle Federation’s Planning and Allocations committee had more money to work with, said Amy Wasser-Simpson, the Federation’s vice president for planning and community services.
All told, allocations to the local agencies and international organizations — through the American-Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and Jewish Agency for Israel — increased by about 7.5 percent overall from last year.
Wasser-Simpson gave much of the credit for the increased allocations to the agencies themselves, most of whom have for the past four years been working on honing their requests through an objective scoring process based upon several uniform criteria.
“People are really taking seriously the attributes we developed,” she said. “Agencies are achieving higher scores and therefore increasing allocations.”
Wasser-Simpson said the organizations that saw increases had been able to present themselves more clearly and concisely.
“Some of them articulated what their programmatic pieces are in a way that gave Planning and Allocation members more insight into the work of the agency,” she said.
Ken Weinberg, CEO of Jewish Family Service of Greater Seattle, said he received notification about his agency’s increased allocation as he began his normal Sunday morning ritual of diving into the New York Times with his wife.
“I had a great Father’s Day, and it started with reading the allocation letter,” Weinberg said. “I was very, very pleased, very excited.”
Nearly all of the increase to JFS — about $28,000 — will go toward emergency services.
“Food, housing, heat in the winter, those are things that people simply can’t live without, and those things are an enormous challenge for us because the numbers of utilizers is so high,” Weinberg said. Of JFS’s allocation request, he said, “I think that we were much more explicit than we ever have been of the extent to which there is need in our community. I think we spelled that out extremely carefully both for JFS and for the Seattle Association for Jews with Disabilities.”
SAJD, a subsidiary of JFS, received an increased allocation of $4,669 that will help to cover the fees its clients are increasingly unable to pay.
For an organization that had prepared itself for the worst, “I know that the entire board of directors and my staff all feel an enormous sense of gratitude to the Federation for this increase,” Weinberg said. “We’re going to be able to do more of what we want to do, which is help more people who are in need.”
Judy Neuman, CEO of the Stroum Jewish Community Center, felt the same sense of surprise, but also a validation of the strides her organization has made over the past few years. She said the JCC has been working hard to reach the requirements set forth by the Federation’s process, which asks for demonstration of collaboration between organizations, creating innovative programs, and adhering to its stated mission.
“This allocation is really a vote of confidence and allows us to continue along the wonderful path we’re on,” Neuman said.
The JCC’s increase of $23,931, to $320,131, will go toward infrastructure and for funding new and existing programs that Neuman said are necessary but not necessarily moneymakers.
“The mission-driven programs don’t drive revenue, but they build community,” she said.
Several educational and cultural organizations actually saw decreases in their allocations this year. Rivy Poupko Kletenik, head of school at Seattle Hebrew Academy, noted that despite a drop of $3,300, the school had received several gifts through the Federation’s Small and Simple grant program as well as $50,000 in an emergency grant and loan after a mudslide on the school’s property.
“I think it all balances out,” Kletenik said. “It’s more of a package, and when you look at things like this you have to look at it as a package.”
The agencies that received more money did so at a time when the community campaign’s revenue, for the first time in many years, fell under $5 million. A number of factors came into play for the smaller intake: The Federation closed the campaign four months earlier than last year to allow for a transition to a new fundraising and allocations model; several larger donors did not make a donation this year, costing the Federation several hundred thousand dollars in lost income; and the economy still played a part.
“Most of our donors either kept their gifts flat or were able to increase a little bit,” Fruchter said. “We did bring new donors into the mix, and that’s been helpful to us. We have more new donors than many other communities in the country.”
The Federation’s board recognized, however, that the agency could not continue to do business the same way it had with a $6 million campaign and needed to take some drastic measures that included staff layoffs and shedding several programs that didn’t fit into its core philanthropy model.
Two of these programs, Hebrew High and the education services department, had been on the chopping block earlier in the year but were instead handed to Planning and Allocations, which gave the programs line items for the coming year while a decision is made on how or if they should continue.
“Those two positions will remain for this year, even though the funding for these positions will be coming from different places,” Fruchter said.
