By Manny Frishberg, JTNews Correspondent
As the American Jewish Committee celebrated 60 years in the Seattle area, it has adopted a number of changes to streamline the organization and make it more effective for the coming years.
Rabbi Anson Laytner, the executive director of the Seattle chapter, said the group has reformulated its board of directors to emphasize a more active group of supporters, rather than having luminaries with a high profile in the community but limited time and energy to give to the organization on a day-to-day basis.
“One of the things that we’re trying to do is have a board where people are actually doing more things, as opposed to being just a name on a board,” says Laytner. “So we’re in the process of doing two things: one is asking people who actually have not been that participatory to leave the board.
“Someone like Fred Tausend, he’s been on the board since he was a teenager and he said, ‘I’ve been on the board for a long time and I’m ready to move on,’” Laytner says.
Some of the best-known people stepping down include Tausend, a senior partner in the law firm of Kirkpatrick and Lockhart Preston Gates Ellis; serial entrepreneur and venture capitalist Jon Staenberg; former Seattle City Attorney Mark Sidran and Ruthann Kurose.
Kurose was named to the state’s Liquor Control Board by Governor Christine Gregoire in October. She also serves on the board of trustees of Bellevue Community College and on advisory boards and committees for both KCTS and the Seattle Asian Art Museum.
Staenberg is known as one of the most experienced venture capitalists in the Pacific Northwest, having raised three funds totaling over $30 million over the last two decades, providing venture capital funding to more than 100 start-ups. As an entrepreneur he has established two companies and served on the senior management team of several early-stage organizations.
Sidran was elected city attorney three times from 1990 to 2001. He became chairman of the Washington Utilities and Transportation Commission in March 2005.
While they will be stepping down as directors, Laytner says they will continue to be involved with the AJC through a new advisory board currently being set up.
“They’re people who I could call for advice or someone else could call for advice. But then they don’t have to come to meetings which, in many cases, they weren’t able to anyway,” Laytner says. The advisory board will probably have a total of around 20 members.
“They’ll be people who have been involved with AJC in the past either as a board member or just as a member, or past president, or something like that,” he says.
Five incoming board members were announced at the same time that the chapter said good-bye to 10 outgoing directors. The other departing board members are Bryan Cohen, Gloria Gottesman, Shannon Gottesman, Karen Hudelsman, Ron Ralph and Janet Rosenblatt.
“Replacing those people, just takes time,” he explains. “We found good people who were interested and signed them up. We’re going to have a rolling admission, so that rather than wait until once a year to bring new people on, we’ll bring people on as we find them and they express an interest. So we’ll probably bring ourselves up to where we want to be by the end of the coming year.”
The new directors are Brian Goffman, a partner at Madrona Ventures Group and former Microsoft executive; Jerry Hendin, a public relations executive with his own firm, who worked in Singapore from 1998 to 2002 as president and CEO of Edelman Public Relations, Asia-Pacific; Michael Marchand, director of public affairs for the U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services’ Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Region X; Phil Nurick, a lawyer, originally from Cape Town, South Africa, who lived in Israel for a number of years and currently the business manager for the Seattle Jewish Community School and Mindy Stern, social work supervisor at Swedish Family Medicine’s Providence campus, and a member of the Behavioral Science faculty.
“They all have some degree of international experience because that is the direction that AJC is moving in,” Laytner says.
Some of the other changes accomplished over the past year have been in integrating the highly successful annual Jewish Film Festival administration with the larger chapter organization. One of the shifts has been to separate the responsibilities for fundraising from producing the actual event.
“The end result,” in the words of the most recent chapter newsletter, “is that the entire staff operates efficiently and effectively as a team, as opposed to the older model in which AJC and SJFF staff worked separately from one another.” This also works into a goal adopted by the chapter board that the film festival be “both an artistic and financial success,” contributing to the overall fundraising goal of the chapter as a whole.
The 2007 film festival reported not only running in the black for its own operations but clocking record ticket sales, with mid-week attendance at the Museum of History and Industry screenings drawing more than 200 viewers each, an all-time high for the workday film showings. That and the addition of live special guests, including Judd Hirsch, co-star of the indie film Brother’s Shadow and a face long familiar on both the small and large screens, added to the success of this year’s program.
As a result, this year the SJFF was able to contribute $20,000 to the chapter’s funding efforts. That in turn allowed the Seattle chapter to achieve the target set by the national organization of raising 150 percent of its own expenses for the year.