By Joel Magalnick, Editor, JTNews
They’ve been talking about it for as long as 20 years, and it now appears that the JCC is ready to build. Earlier this month, Lindsey Schwartz, the board president for the Stroum Jewish Community Center, sent an e-mail to the JCC’s membership outlining the agency’s plans for the future, including its inception of a capital campaign.
“For years and years we’ve talked about a capital campaign, because that’s what it takes to do the buildout that we need to do,” Schwartz told JTNews. “Our board voted last year to launch…the quiet phase of the campaign.”
So far, Schwartz said, solicitations of the board, past presidents, and other longtime associates of the organization have yielded $4 million in pledges for what is expected to be a $20 million campaign that would focus on the JCC’s facility on Mercer Island.
Plans include site-wide renovations on the 40-year-old building; construction of a physical space for its popular Parenting Center, a curriculum of development programs designed for children from infant to preschool age; an expansion of meeting and activity space that would enable members to hold wedding or B’nai Mitzvah receptions; and other physical improvements. But the campaign would facilitate programmatic growth as well.
“A big component of it is an [early childhood services] expansion,” Schwartz said. “We run our ECS programs at capacity and have for many, many years.”
The board’s strategic plan, which was created in June of 2007, set a timeline for building which, due to the economy, has become somewhat elastic at this point.
“Everything obviously has to be flexible,” Schwartz said.
The JCC may face a challenge in its fundraising with several other campaigns concurrently occurring in the greater Seattle area. Jewish Family Service has been working on its more than $35 million campaign to build a facility to expand its social services net; The Kline Galland Home and Affiliates nursing facility and retirement community hopes to build a $100 million endowment by 2014; and many of the local schools and synagogues are working on campaigns to keep their facilities up to date and functional.
But while there has been consternation among nonprofits nationwide about fundraising in such a dire economic climate, Schwartz said he’s confident the JCC can meet its goals — and he sees a silver lining.
“It heightens people’s awareness that organizations like ours that are important to our community…rely on donors to keep them going, and that now more than ever we need the support of people,” he said.
Schwartz believes the JCC has a compelling story for the Jewish community, one that particularly resonates with young families who use the JCC’s early childhood and parenting programs.
According to Dana Weiner, the JCC’s assistant director for family programs, the center has been a testing ground for various programs that help families with child development. One, called Roots of Empathy, was introduced to Seattle at least year’s Seeds of Compassion conference.
The 27-session program, which is also in the Seattle and Kent public school systems, brings an instructor to the kindergarten classroom each week to work with students on learning to process their own emotions through seeing others’.
“Once every three weeks, a parent and baby…from the community come to the classroom with the instructor for a family visit,” wrote Weiner in an e-mail. “The program teaches children about feelings, their own feelings and the feelings of others. In Roots of Empathy, the baby is the teacher.”
The JCC has also begun to deliver welcome packages to what it estimates are 500 Jewish babies born in the region each year, and taken over administering the Listening Mothers program, which draws from scientific theory to help new mothers emotionally bond with their babies.
It is these types of programs that Schwartz said makes the JCC a draw for those younger families, and in turn brings the parents onto the board, serving as a de facto training ground for young leaders.
“Our board of directors tends to skew a lot younger than a lot other organizations,” Schwartz said. “We feel that a lot of strength we provide to the Jewish community is to create young leaders. It’s something we’ve learned to identify and continue to identify.”
Still, he acknowledged that membership of late has trended slightly downward.
“Our membership is pretty solid. We have attrition every year, but I would say we’re marginally down,” Schwartz said. “It’s not a huge number.”
One bombshell in the e-mail sent to members was the announcement that the JCC’s executive director, Barry Sohn, was no longer with the agency.
“When we went to the strategic planning process and identified what our needs are going to be over the next five to seven years, one of them being to conduct a successful capital campaign,” Schwartz said. “We just felt that we wanted to go in a different direction as far as identifying the best possible leader to get us to help meet those goals.”
Sohn had been the JCC’s director for six and a half years. Under Sohn’s tenure came the creation of the Parenting Center as well as the move of the Northend Seattle location, which had been located in an aging building, into its current home in a newly built facility at Temple Beth Am.
Matt Grogan, the JCC’s assistant director, is serving as interim director while a search gets underway. Schwartz said that the new leader would have to be a “visionary” and that “we’re going to have a big expectation that the person can help guide us through the capital campaign process.”
One issue the JCC has been facing this year has been how to reduce $150,000 in expenses, due mainly to reduced allocations from its largest funding sources, the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle and United Way of King County. In a letter to members in December, Schwartz and Sohn had written that the board was taking a look at its fee and scholarship structures to increase its income and close that budget gap.
“It’s always something we’re monitoring very closely, and evaluating and adjusting throughout the year as needed,” Schwartz said. “We’re constantly in the process of making changes to the budget as the year goes on. I don’t see this year as looking much different than what we’ve been through in the past.”