By Joel Magalnick, Editor, The Jewish Sound
The next three years at the Stroum Jewish Community Center look something like this: A lot more arts programming, more experimentation in fitness and outreach programs, small changes in the look and feel of its Mercer Island facility, and more emphasis on maintaining and building the quality of its early childhood school. That’s what most members will see.
Taking a peek under the hood, however, a committee convened by the SJCC’s board nearly a year ago has created a three-year strategic plan that will also look at incremental improvements and repairs to the organization’s aging structure, build a long-overdue endowment, and continue the momentum of a donor base that has increased by 35 percent over the past two years.
“The JCC has had somewhat of a renaissance and lot of growth over the last few years,” according to Aaron Alhadeff, the SJCC’s immediate past president. “The staff and the board and the community decided we need to figure out what we’re going to focus on.”
The plan consists of four of the SJCC’s most pressing priorities, which Alhadeff said had to be culled down from a list of seven or eight:
• Early childhood
• Long-term financial stability
• Facilities
• Community engagement
“Some of the things we’ve been doing for a long time are really important and some of those things need more attention and more focus,” Alhadeff said.
Specifically, the early childhood school (ECS), which is one of the agency’s largest programs, needs to come front and center. “It starts a lot of people’s journey into the Jewish community,” he said. “We know we’re great. We want to be the best.”
Judy Neuman, the SJCC’s CEO, said the marketplace for early childhood programs is far different even from when she took the reins five years ago.
“Whether it be synagogue preschools, whether it be day school preschools, and whether it be secular top-tier preschools, we are not the only game in town and we know it,” she said, “so part of the focus is making sure that we stay way on top of our game, that we’re out in front of it from a trend perspective.”
That includes looking, on an annual basis, at teacher compensation and price points for parents to ensure the school is staying ahead of the curve.
“If you don’t stay focused on that, you can kid yourself, and you might still be saying it, but you’re not delivering it,” Neuman said.
The SJCC has already come a long way in improving its short-term financial stability. The budget has grown from $6.5 million five years ago to $9.5 million for Fiscal Year 2015, according to Neuman. And while money is often tight, the agency has delivered revenue-neutral or surplus budgets over that period.
For the long term, while it won’t happen in the first year of this strategic plan, Neuman said it’s unusual that a 65-year-old agency like the SJCC would not have established an endowment.
“That’s something I feel is really, really important for the ‘J’ long term,” she said. It’s critical “to have a little flexibility by building an endowment to fund the next new bright ideas that we have, or to supplement and sustain the things that we’re currently doing.”
She cited the SJCC’s takeover of the Seattle Jewish Film Festival two years ago, coupled with this year’s $5 million renovation of its auditorium, as a perfect example.
“We made a big bet when we did our renovation and we hired a team to build a cultural arts platform,” she said. “We also know that arts necessarily ever break even, or pay for themselves, or certainly make money.”
So for the SJCC to fully establish itself as a hub for Jewish arts, which has already begun to see success, Neuman said, it will need to be supported more broadly than through operating dollars.
What the SJCC will do this year, however, is begin allocating money to facility upkeep.
“We have a very old building, and so the operating budget has been heavily burdened by surprises,” Neuman said. “We now feel that it’s very prudent for us…to budget for and allocate resources to the capital reserve.”
Alhadeff agreed.
“We want to get away from having to make a panicked call to a donor, and being prepared ourselves,” he said.
When it comes to facilities, Alhadeff said the SJCC is not gearing up for a specific capital project.
“A lot of times the community dictates that. The leaders of the community will tell you,” he said. “They’ll tell you with their heads, their hearts, and their checkbooks.”
The auditorium renovation, he said, was intended to be a “proof of concept” that needs to show value before the next big thing.
“We need to fill that auditorium. We need people coming in multiple times a day. We need there to be demand,” he said. “We need to see it was a smart investment.”
But Neuman said facility changes are afoot.
“We have a very long laundry list, if you will, of all the things that need repair [and] restoration,” she said. “We’ll continue to look, and look at more formally, what are the aesthetic enhancements both externally and internally…to make this a more inspiring place to be in.”
There are no plans to purchase or build a space in Seattle’s Northend, which has its satellite ECS program housed at Temple Beth Am and summer day camp at Seattle Jewish Community School. But that’s where the community engagement component comes in.
“There’s a lot of brick and mortar across greater Seattle, and you can take programs in and out of those physical spaces regardless of who the sponsor is, and fully maximize the investment the community has made in all of that brick and mortar,” Neuman said.
The impetus for this plan came from a board realization that it needed a longer-term view of where to invest its time and energy, according to Liz Friedman, who with current board president Aaron Wolff co-chaired the strategic plan committee.
“We found that in order to meet the overall vision and mission and values at the ‘J,’ we would need to really deliver value to the community along each of those four [priorities],” Friedman said. “The plan really is a way of breaking down some of those bigger, harder decisions or discussions, putting an order to them and priority to them, and really breaking them down into manageable pieces so we could make progress on the big, hard things instead of postponing them.”
Over the past year, the committee, which included senior staff, board members, SJCC members, and some non-members, worked with a consultant and the wider community to set the direction.
At the end of this three-year process, the SJCC’s staff and lay leaders all hope to have a greater insight into the organization’s identity and impact on the community, in addition to the more tangible improvements.
“I expect to have a lot more information on all these [priority] areas, a lot more visibility on what we offer, and hopefully even greater commitment from the community and investment in the organization,” Friedman said. “There’s just a unique and special energy there right now.”