By Manny Frishberg, JTNews Correspondent
When Barry Sohn took the reins at the Stroum Jewish Community Center half a year ago, his task was similar to a man who must change a flat tire while his car continues down the highway at 65 miles per hour. Not only had the J been hit with the fundraising triple-whammy that has affected all the nonprofit groups in the community — the dot-com bombs, Boeing lay-offs, and the shift in giving after September 11th — but a year ago the JCC’s financial officers had found a $600,000 shortfall shortly after the start of the fiscal year.
Now, Sohn said, the organization is not only on track to wipe clean this year’s deficit, but he hopes to make a dent in the long-term debt left over from previous years.
Sohn tells the Transcript, “I am very pleased with the progress that we have made. Both at the staff end and at the lay leadership end, I feel a new sense of energy and I think both the staff and the lay leadership are working hard to create a positive feel at the J.”
But at least as important, Sohn said, are the structural changes he’s been making to streamline the management and offer more activities and services to the membership. Departments are merging throughout the center. The Youth and Family Services Dept. and the Adult Services Dept. have combined to create the new Group Services Department, headed by Asher Hashash. Membership and Marketing have become a single department, and the JCC’s summer youth, sports camps, and traditional Jewish day camps are now under the direction of Karla Anderson, who was promoted from Youth Sports Director to Camp Director.
Sohn said by promoting Erin Bruce from JCC Aquatics Director to Assistant Director of the Health and P.E. Department, Health and P.E. Director Matt Grogan will be able to become more involved in the overall facilities management.
Sohn also said that the while structural changes made in staffing were in part financial, they were also designed to make the JCC “better positioned as an agency in driving programs and membership.”
“I had to figure out ways that we could create more quality to our programming and create opportunities to add more members,” he continued. “That’s really what has motivated a lot of the changes.”
“What it’s really about, ” said Membership and Marketing Director Josefin Kannin, “is integration of things that should have been integrated already. It’s trying to make things work more efficiently and effectively by creating one person to oversee programs that should naturally work together.”
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Before the changes, Kannin was the JCC’s PR and Marketing Manager. She said Sohn is working toward “creating a seamless approach” to the divisions’ functions to give the staff “a certain amount of flexibility [so they] will be able to understand the functions of everybody else in that department.”
Josefin Kannin said the changes don’t stop with rearranging of the boxes on an organizational chart. Several changes are under consideration for handling memberships.
None of what she discussed with the Transcript has been decided upon, she said, but the possibilities include dividing memberships into functional categories, such as Fitness Memberships or Early Childhood Services Memberships.
“My feeling is that, overall, people are happy with the JCC and the programs and services that we offer,” Kannin said. She added that they are shifting to a purely membership organization.
“There are some people who would like to just buy a membership to the part of the JCC that they are going to utilize,” she continued. “Another thing we’re considering is including more of our programs in the basic price of membership, adding more value to that membership.”
In the winter class catalogue, Kannin said people will find 20 new programs, including performing and fine-arts.
The new Parenting Center will offer Jewish holiday programming and parent education programming, as well as activities for infants and toddlers. “We’re hoping to reach a group of people that we haven’t really worked with previously,” Kannin said.
For his part, Sohn is emphasizing ways to make the memberships a better value overall. His goal is to increase the number of individual and family memberships by about 45 percent over the next three years.
“Programs drive membership,” said Sohn, “so that’s where we’ve been putting our energy.”
He said they want to have more adult programming in the Northend, so Hashash is meeting with leaders of other Jewish organizations, exploring partnerships in North Seattle and “looking at venues that we might be able to rent to run programs out of, because we’re not going to be able to run all that programming out of our own facility in Wedgewood.”
Sohn is also committed to adding to the Jewish experience of the JCC. To do that, he has hired a Jewish programming specialist, Rabbi Elana Zaiman.
“She is a very high-energy person who has a lot of passion about Judaism. I think she is going to come in and really enhance the Jewish ambiance of the J and really produce a Jewish flavor for our programs.”
“I’ve been meeting with the communal leaders. I’ve been trying to get their take on the J. I’ve been sharing my vision of where we’re going and we’ve been talking about ways that the J could be better positioned in the community.” said Sohn.
He will leave any major fundraising initiatives aside until he has succeeded in putting the changes in place that he sees as necessary for the long term health of the center.
“My focus,” he said, “has been much more on dealing with the internal operation of the J.”