By Joel Magalnick, Editor, JTNews
In comparison, the numbers don’t look so bad. Federations in places like Denver, Milwaukee and Boca Raton saw their community campaigns drop by as much as 35 percent, which makes Seattle’s 10 percent decline feel rosy by comparison. But a community campaign in the Mile High City doesn’t feed the hungry on Capitol Hill, and it’s that drop in income for the Seattle-area Jewish community to which the population will most closely pay attention.
With a final campaign total of $5.575 million, down from last year’s total of $6.05 million, many local and international agencies who are already seeing their own donations dragged down with the economy are getting a second dose of bad news as their allocations from the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle are reduced as well. But with a scoring system for agencies in place since last year, not all of the beneficiaries supported by the Federation are seeing their allocations go down.
“People who are in Planning and Allocations spent a lot of time looking at last year’s scores, this year’s scores, presentations, the mission partnership, how they provide services, what the services are, how critical they are,” said Richard Fruchter, the Federation’s president and CEO.
On average, he said, the drop in allocations was about 10 percent, though “some people got a little more, some people got a little less.”
That “little more” is the good news, at least for the four agencies that received higher allocations than last year. The Stroum Jewish Community Center, the Federation’s second largest local beneficiary, received a 1.2 percent bump over last year’s allocation, from $329,600 to $333,700. The Washington State Jewish Historical Society, which is among the Federation’s smallest beneficiaries, got a $200 increase to $1,800. Two schools, the Seattle Hebrew Academy and the Menachem Mendel Seattle Cheder, received a .9 percent increase to $101,000 and a 1.6 percent increase to $24,400, respectively.
The bad news, however, came with larger percentage points. Jewish Family Service and its satellite agency Seattle Association for Jews with Disabilities, the Federation’s largest beneficiary, together saw a decrease of 10.8 percent, to $477,800 from $535,300.
JFS has been struggling over the past year as many of its own big donors have suffered catastrophic economic losses while money from the state for some of the social services it provides has decreased.
Hillel at the University of Washington saw a 10.5 percent decrease to $168,500 from $188,100.
Rabbi Will Berkovitz, Hillel’s executive director, told JTNews the reduced allocation comes at an interesting time: A contraction in general of the nonprofit world coupled with the dying of a generation that would support Jewish organizations, no questions asked. Yet conversations Berkovitz has had with members of the young adult population his organization serves show that they need Hillel running at its full potential more than ever.
“We’re at a time when the need for what we do is dramatically increasing,” he said. “The number of young folks that I work with that are losing their jobs [and] the number of young people seeking community because their world is being turned upside down, is dramatically increasing.”
Even if the economy does rebound a year from now, the work organizations like Hillel undertook to reach their high watermark prior to the recession will recover much more slowly.
“It’s going to take a lot longer to reengage some of those folks,” Berkovitz said. “It feels like running up a sand dune.”
UW Hillel, in response to not just the Federation’s allocation drop but also to unfulfilled grants and drops in its own donations, has scaled back on staff and programming, and frozen salaries to make up for the shortfall.
In some ways, Hillel’s allocation drop is the result of the organization being a victim of its own success.
The process for deciding allocations has undergone a dramatic shift in the past two years, as the Federation switched to a software program called Dwaffler, which uses criteria that compares how each organization serves the community, then ranks the results numerically. Those numbers, combined with a scale of how much that agency has improved over the past year’s scores, gave the Federation’s Planning and Allocations committee the tools to figure out how much to allocate. Organizations were given a built-in a guarantee of 75 percent of the previous year’s allocation.
Committee member Julia Bacharach, who also sits on Hillel’s board, said that because Hillel had done so well last year, there wasn’t much room for improvement within the Dwaffler criteria, therefore lowering its overall allocation.
“They are not likely to get any allocation from improvement because they had done so well last year,” Bacharach said, but keeping the allocation consistent while working with a smaller pot of money proved impossible. “If you want to reward people for improvement, it has to come from somewhere.”
With the economy doing so poorly and less money coming in, making those final decisions was a painful process for everyone involved.
“There was concern, especially given the economy, that in the end emotions would override the ratings, and they didn’t,” Bacharach said. She also noted that many members of the Planning and Allocations committee were very upset that overseas programs could not be better funded.
“The hit that the international programs took was incredibly painful,” she said.
Most of the committee’s 18 members sit on boards for other local Jewish organizations, so they understand the pain of cutting from their pet agencies.
“People on the committee let the numbers do their work, but still feel very badly that there isn’t more and feel very badly [about] some of the cuts that agencies get,” Bacharach said. “We do understand it’s painful, and it’s not done lightly and flippantly.”
To make up for some of the shortfall, Federation CEO Fruchter said the Federation’s Special Initiatives Fund repurposed its Long-Term Community Impact Grant this year to give an extra $65,000 toward local critical needs. In addition, the Federation-based Women’s Endowment Foundation gave out $200,000 in grants, including $43,500 to Jewish Family Service’s Project DVORA, a program that works with Jewish survivors of domestic violence. The program might otherwise have had to close its doors due to cuts in government funding.
Fruchter also pointed out that with a last-minute matching challenge, the Federation secured 180 additional gifts, and over the course of the year increased its donor base more than in the organization’s history, which could bode well for allocations as the economy recovers.