By Joel Magalnick, JTNews Correspondent
In years past, Jewish Family Service of Greater Seattle would bring in speakers as widely known as CNN Anchor Aaron Brown or Tipper Gore to give words of inspiration and to relay personal anecdotes for its annual fundraising luncheon. This year, things are different. It is still unclear as to whether the economy has hit bottom, the line to JFS’ food bank routinely stretches around the block, and the amount the agency is receiving in donations is, like so many nonprofits these days, going down.
So JFS is taking a gamble. Rather than pay thousands of dollars to fly in another Harry Belafonte for 45 minutes of talking and singing, this year the social service agency is going local — very local. Its CEO, Ken Weinberg, will get on the dais to do a bit more than introduce his organization’s client success stories and ask people to open their hearts (and wallets). He’ll be the main attraction.
“It was not my idea,” said Weinberg.
Actually, Weinberg said, he’s honored the committee that planned this year’s luncheon asked him to step in.
“People who know me know that I tend to be more of a half-empty-glass kind of guy,” he said, “but that is not what I project. Nor should it be what I project. I think it’s really important to project hope and humor and definitely a sense that we can do what we need to do.”
Those needs are great. The services JFS provides can be a challenge during good times. In bad times — and Weinberg minces no words when he says we’re experiencing bad times — they are fighting an uphill battle to provide necessary and emergency services for their ever-expanding list of clients, while dealing with the reality of shrinking income from not only donors, but from state contracts as well.
“I think the past year was one of the hardest, probably in American history,” he said.
Weinberg has numbers to back that up. This past January, the JFS food bank provided food to more than 1,000 households — about 5,000 people. That’s about double what the food bank provided in January 2008, he said.
In February, the agency saw a 300 percent increase of clients in need of its full array of services, compared to previous months. While the increase in need has not gone up as dramatically since then, he added, the demand has not gone down.
Project DVORA, JFS’ domestic violence assistance program, and one of the only programs to provide cash assistance to its clients, has had to dole out more money to more people than ever before.
“The list goes on,” Weinberg said.
Statewide, the 24 percent cut in the General Assistance–Unemployable program, which gives temporary monthly stipends to the people most in need, and 43 percent chopped from Washington’s Basic Health program, will hit even harder.
“Though we haven’t been providing those things, the state has, and when your remove it from the state they will come here and they will want help,” Weinberg said. “We cannot give a monthly stipend to a few thousand people. It’s just not possible. We cannot provide basic medical care to people. At least in my opinion, governments are supposed to provide that… not a social service agency. We are supposed to supplement. We’re supposed to fill in the cracks, and now the cracks are like fissures.”
So what happens when these fissures get too wide for social service agencies to fill?
“If you take a sum of money and you spread it too thin, it has no impact on anybody,” Weinberg said.
Which means, ultimately, that if things continue to get worse and the money coming in — with more reliance being placed on individual donors — turns to a trickle, people could get turned away, something that would happen grudgingly and as a last resort.
“Our mission is to serve people in need. That’s what we’re supposed to do,” Weinberg said. “That is the mandate from the community.”
Weinberg said he has seen a slowdown — not a reversal and not a leveling, he noted — in the number of people being laid off in the past couple of months. It gives him some glimmer of optimism that there could be some kind of easing of the crunch he and his staff are feeling. But any turnaround will not be instantaneous, despite headlines newspapers like the Seattle Times have touted of late.
“For all the folks who are unemployed, absorbing them back into decent-paying jobs is going to take a long time,” he said. “You don’t take tens of millions of unemployed people and all of a sudden they’re all employed.”
Steps have been taken in JFS — including sending some people to the unemployment line — to keep the organization running its mission. In addition, all staff have taken a mandated unpaid furlough, some positions have been combined while others have been left unfilled, and employees are being asked to cover more health coverage premiums while cost-of-living salary increases have been frozen for 2010, among other steps taken.
Those steps have saved the agency close to $500,000, Weinberg said.
Morale, he added, is decent given the environment, an assessment several of his employees would agree with.
As for the building JFS hopes to build, it’s still expected to happen — though scaled back significantly. The agency won’t take direct service funds for construction, but Weinberg said they do need the space.
“We are now really crunched in here,” he said. “We have a food bank — the lines are extending quite far, and we need a facility that can handle the new needs of the community.”
He hopes JFS can tap into public money for the building, and said it’s possible that economic stimulus dollars could be coming to them as well.
Though Weinberg had been anticipating the economy’s crash for some time, what took him by surprise was the lack of predictability in how it affected the community, as well as the scope of the depth of people’s losses.
Most of the money from his wealthiest donors came from appreciated stock, which in a down market presents an obvious problem: “Of course there isn’t any appreciated stock, there’s almost nothing that’s appreciated,” Weinberg said. “I didn’t realize that pretty much everybody has less: Pretty much every foundation has less. Government has less. Federation has less. United Way has less. Find the entity that has more. There isn’t one.”
Weinberg’s next challenge then, is to stand up in front of a room of more than 1,000 people and explain all of this without depressing them too much to open their checkbooks. And JFS is counting more heavily than ever on this luncheon to help make their budget goals, he said, “which is scary.”
But JFS volunteers are pushing hard for attendees, Weinberg’s brushing up on his keynote speech, and everyone’s sitting nervously and hoping for the best.
“I expect it to do wonderfully,” Weinberg said.
The Jewish Family Service “Community of Caring” luncheon takes place Tues., May 19 from noon – 1:30 p.m. at the Westin Hotel in downtown Seattle. No cost for the event, but a minimum $150 donation is requested. RSVPs required by e-mailing gpollack@jfsseattle.org.