By Donna Gordon Blankinship, Editor, JTNews
Pledges to the 2002 Jewish Federation Community Campaign totaled a little over $10 million, fund-raising chair Iantha Sidell announced at the end of April.
The leap past last year’s $9.2 million achievement was mostly attributed to a successful extra fund-raising effort to collect emergency money for social services in Israel. The Israel Now campaign had collected pledges totaling about $650,000 when this paper went to press, but the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle is continuing to collect cash and pledges for this effort.
While excited about the success of the Israel Now effort and about passing the $10 million mark, Sidell said the achievement had a bittersweet quality to it.
“I would much rather be celebrating peace in Israel than a $10 million campaign,” she said.
Adds Barry Goren, executive vice president of the Jewish Federation, “We’ve raised a lot of money for Israel Now in the last three weeks, really since Passover.… The Netanya attack, particularly on seder night, was really a turning point for Jews around the world.”
Although Jewish federations around the country were already raising money to help Israel survive its 18-month-long crisis, the fund-raising effort picked up steam after Passover. In the greater Seattle area, more than 800 people have responded to the Israel Now campaign, including more than 40 families who have each pledged $10,000 or more.
The Israel Now campaign will support efforts coordinated between the federation system’s partners in Israel — the Jewish Agency for Israel and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee — and the Israeli government. This will include financial assistance to the victims of terror and their families, along with human services, grief and trauma counseling and medical and communications equipment.
Goren noted that the Jewish Federation did not hire any additional staff to mount this emergency campaign. “We’ve raised this extra money with our existing operation. People need to know that its good to have an infrastructure that’s here to respond to emergency situations,” he added.
The Israel Now campaign will continue even though the 2002 Community Campaign was completed in April.
The total campaign achievement — including Israel Now — was up 9 percent overall, in what the fund-raisers call “a very tough fund-raising environment,” due mostly to the economy.
The increases can be seen mostly in “designated giving” and “pass-through” donations. Donors who give $5,000 or more to the Community Campaign have the option of designating where their increase will go and may also use the Jewish Federation as a clearinghouse for their other charitable giving.
Out of the $10 million campaign total, $3.37 million will pass through the federation and go directly to other agencies — mostly, but not exclusively, Jewish agencies in the greater Seattle area. For example, federation donors gave nearly $505,000 to the Hillel Capital Campaign to help pay for the local Hillel’s new building. They set aside more than $225,000 to help the Seattle Hebrew Academy solve its building problem. About $1 million went to the Ben- Gurion University of the Negev as pass- through gifts. A total of 80 funds will receive pass-through gifts through the Jewish Federation.
The biggest part of the Community Campaign is what the Jewish Federation calls the “unrestricted fund.” These are donations that are given to beneficiary agencies in Seattle and around the world. The division of these funds is supervised by a committee of volunteers called the Planning and Allocations Committee. Each year, agencies from the Jewish Family Service to The Jewish Transcript make an allocation request to the Planning and Allocations Committee.
When the campaign is finished, the committee decides how to divide up the money. This year, because donations to the unrestricted fund are down about $300,000, or 5 percent under last year’s achievement, most agencies can expect cuts of up to 5 percent in their allocations.
“We’re not thrilled about it,” Goren said of the decrease in unrestricted funds. “That’s what our agency partners rely on.” In addition to the economic downturn, Goren said increasing competition from more sophisticated and more intense fund-raising campaigns at other agencies has made community fund-raising more difficult for the Jewish Federation.
“We are vulnerable in our annual campaign to changes from our top donors. They can die, or move, or their financial situation changes, or their level of commitment changes. There’s a whole range of things that cause individuals who are large donors [who give $10,000 or more] and we took some very significant reversals in that category this year — some driven by financial forces, some by other forces such as death or relocation,” Goren said.
He said the campaign was impacted by a total of $300,000 in decreases from nine donors this year. “That’s tough to make up,” he said.
Goren added, however, that inspiring efforts by volunteer leaders Iantha Sidell and Neil Ross, plus hard work by the federation staff, ensured that the unrestricted fund was not down more than 5 percent.
One of the highlights of the campaign was the achievement of the Women’s Division. The women’s campaign raised $2.7 million, with women who gave to the 2001 campaign averaging a 21-percent increase in 2002. With just unrestricted giving totaled, the Women’s Division raised $2.2 million, with a increase of 20 percent over last year, person by person.