By Emily K. Alhadeff, Assistant Editor, JTNews
Since 1892, when it was called the Hebrew Ladies Benevolent Society and it cared for immigrants, widows and orphans, Jewish Family Service has not had a building it felt it could call its own.
JFS’s former home, the Jessie Danz building on Capitol Hill, operated as an eye clinic before the social service organization took it over. It had virtually no windows, and the board could barely fit into one room for meetings. Two programs had to be located offsite.
“We had outgrown our building, and we had outgrown it dramatically,” said Ken Weinberg, JFS’s CEO.
The agency’s new 19,000-square—foot, $9.1 million building, which was built adjacent to the old Danz building, will officially open to the public April 1.
Refugee and immigrant services offices in Bellevue and Kent will remain in their current locations.
The goal was “to get us all to one site, and to create a campus here,” facilities manager Keara Kazanjian explained during a tour of the building. “Another element was to make our private services more private.”
“It was never a social-service agency with issues of confidentiality, soundproofing, [and] a waiting room where people could not be seen by the general public,” Weinberg said.
The old Jessie Danz building will continue to hold the JFS Polack Food Bank and counseling services. With the help of a $500,000 Community Development Block Grant from the federal stimulus package in 2009 and support from Kathy and Steve Berman, JFS opened its renovated food bank in 2010 and is currently making the counseling space more privacy-friendly.
After years of working in the dark, JFS employees now have the pleasure of airy, modern, light-filled quarters. Every office has a window.
“There are studies that show that people are more productive and happier and content when there’s natural light,” said Weinberg.
Not only that, but the building was designed to be as eco-friendly as possible and is certified LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Silver. Among the requisites of certification: Over three-quarters of indoor spaces are day-lit, the toilets are low-flow, many building materials are recycled or locally sourced, and over 90 percent of construction waste was salvaged or recycled. The metal grate along the outside of the building is not a security feature, Kazanjian pointed out, but a brise-soleil, which reduces heat accumulation and regulates temperature in the building.
“If the agency’s mission is tikkun olam, to repair the world, then you should have a building that’s consistent with that mission,” Weinberg said.
The building committee also mandated an elevator to connect the lobby and the new building’s two upper floors to the food bank, which operates on the basement level, to make navigating the campus easier for people with limited mobility. For employees and clients with very high mobility, there’s bike parking, not to mention a few parking spots for energy-efficient vehicles.
The new building was already in the works when it received $2.3 million from Washington State’s Building Communities fund last June. While that was “nothing short of miraculous,” Weinberg said, the process of planning and building was far from easy.
“I would rank it as my most difficult project in my 37 years at the agency,” Weinberg said. Working by consensus, collaborating with city officials and neighbors, and having to scale down the plans due to the rough economic patch that hit and stuck around made it a challenging project.
With that said, Weinberg returns to the topic of generosity more than once. Two $5-million donors, along with the state funding and an outpouring of community support made this happen. Artwork has been loaned and donated, including a sculpture en route from Dale Chihuly.
“I am proud of what we’ve done, and I think the community should be proud,” said Weinberg. “This was really a communal effort.”
But ultimately, it’s not about the building.
“We all recognize that that is the minor story,” Weinberg said. “The major story is what goes in inside the building. It’s wonderful to have a beautiful home, but the thing that’s really as important is who inhabits the home, what are they doing. That’s the story.”