By Joel Magalnick, Editor, JTNews
Several weeks after taking the reins of the Stroum Jewish Community Center, CEO Judy Neuman sat down with JTNews to share her thoughts on how the JCC currently serves the community and her vision of what the JCC can be in the future.
JTNews: What do you think of your new job so far?
Judy Neuman: I’m loving it actually, it’s wonderful. I spent, really, the first several weeks looking inside the box, if you will, really looking inside the JCC, meeting all the team members. I’m not through everybody yet, but I literally want to meet and spend time with every person on our payroll so I understand who they are, how they got there, why they’re there, what they do, so it gives me a chance not only to meet them and understand a little more about them, but it’s also my introduction to all the programs and services that we offer.
I call it my sponge period. I’m absorbing a lot, and filtering and stepping back and assessing and really just learning. I have a very steep learning curve. Even though I’ve been in this community a long time, I certainly haven’t been inside the J as a professional ever — here anyway — and it’s been wonderful. The staff has been gracious and welcoming and in between all of that, my third day was our annual meeting and I’ve already had a board meeting. I’ve already jumped into the deep end of the pool.
JT: A few weeks from now, you’ll be like, this is what we have to offer…
Neuman: I’ll be a lot smarter. That’s for darn sure.
JT: Do you feel settled in?
Neuman: I feel like I’m settling in. Certainly settled into the rhythm of the J, and understanding just how many people come and go in and out of that building all day long from 5 a.m. to 9-10 p.m. at night. It’s a really, really active place, and having not been closely associated with it for many years, it’s sort of a best-kept secret. I think a lot of people would be surprised by the level of activity and the amount of people at all age ranges coming in and out of that building. That’s been very fun for me. I manage by walking around, so as I’m in the halls and going to the different professional team members’ office areas and cubes and things like that it gets me out into the building, as opposed to sitting in an office, and I love the engagement with the members and community members that come in and out of the building all day long. It’s been great.
JT: Different from Centerstone Executive Search, your previous position?
Neuman: Very different. There we went to our clients, we go to our clients. Clients never really came to us, and so much of the work in the executive search business has been phone and e-mail, phone and e-mail, phone and e-mail, and certainly some in person. But this has just been wonderful. The community is a wonderful community, and it ‘s nice to see such a really strong cross section of them every single day.
JT: Are you already feeling a sense of ownership?
Neuman: I am. Absolutely. I’d like to think I’m a pretty quick study, and even while I’m observing I’m forming opinions and thinking through how do we get at really talking about, in a very specific way, all the really strong and wonderful programs we offer and then how do we start talking to the community more broadly to find out what the community wants and needs from a JCC that really is a tremendous outreach arm — and can be. It’s a very non-threatening environment to walk into and we really need to examine the gaps, because there clearly are gaps. But I don’t want it to be my assumptions on what the gaps are. I really want to hear it from a good cross section of the community to understand how we can do more innovative programming and meet some of the needs that just aren’t being met anywhere else.
JT: Have you set any short-term goals for yourself?
Neuman: I created a 90-day plan for myself. I shared that with my board and with my team members. I really started inside the J, and then from an info-gathering, moving out and really developing relationships with the board and with past presidents, to glean some history and perspective of the J over the past 60 years — we just celebrated our 60th birthday — so its been a figure and a fixture in the community for 60 years, and then meeting with community members and Jewish professionals, and professionals outside of the Jewish community as well to understand what everyone’s doing and how we can collaborate. I’m a big collaborator, and I think the J has an opportunity to collaborate in a much fuller way in the community and with the community. Each agency doesn’t have to invent it all and run it all and own it all themselves. How can we work more collaboratively to really make this a special Jewish community for people at every level of engagement? We’re not there yet as a community, and I’d like the J to be an active voice at the table and work to bring that to fruition.
JT: What about long-term goals?
Neuman: I’m probably not there yet, three weeks in. I really want to understand the rhythm of the business that we’re in, I want to understand how it benchmarks against other JCCs nationally, I want to understand how it benchmarks against our local community. From our my corporate background I’m a data gatherer, and so I like to have good facts and then I couple that with what I think is good gut and intuition, and then I formulate a plan. But when I formulate a plan in sort of the future of what the Stroum Jewish Community Center can be for the whole community, it won’t be done in my office in a vacuum. It will be done with a good cross section of the community and we’ll work together to make it happen.
I can daydream about what pieces of that might look like, but I’m not ready to commit to anything yet because I just don’t have enough information.
JT: How helpful have people in the JCC overall been? Are the people who would give you the information you need giving it to you?
Neuman: People have been every engaged in dialogue and conversation, not just with me, but with each other, both inside the J and as I bump into community members. It’s sort of concentric circles — it’s starting with the J team, and then it’s moving to the board and to the past presidents, and then it’s moving out to the board and community professional leadership, and then it’s moving out to community members and JCC members, which are not exclusively the same, as you know.
A lot of my year will be spent really talking to the community and we’ll shape it, as we go along, but in terms of a big, brand new vision for the agency, that’s not fully formed yet, and three weeks is probably a little premature to think I might have that.
JT: What are some of the challenges you’re seeing right off the bat?
Neuman: I think some of the challenges are, [and] certainly would include: We could do a better job talking to the community as an agency. We could do a better job, not marketing ourselves necessarily, but bringing people into the know, helping people understand what business is the J in, really evaluating “Does everything we do map to our mission?”
I think mission statements, if used properly, are guiding forces. So from a mission and vision perspective, evaluating what we’re doing currently and then that will guide us to where we need to go. Also making sure we’re not duplicative, so that we can either hand off to another agency to pick up when we’re finished with something, or, again, where we can sit side by side and think about how our missions can work together to deliver that richer experience. I think there’s a lot of opportunity for innovation, and that’s not just a buzzword. From my eyes I think the Jewish community at large and certainly nationally and internationally, is grappling with old models, and how do those models need to change and morph and be more relevant.
So probably the most critical eye is around how do we ensure that we are relevant to our community today and going forward so that we can sustain ourselves and so we can be that link to Jewish continuity — not the only link, but a key link to that. That’s sustainability, it’s not just green and solar panels — it’s really perpetuating the Jewish people in a meaningful way through this kind of an agency that really touches so many people.
JT: You’ve touched so many different people with your involvement in so many local Jewish agencies. Based on your lay experience, do you see that collaboration being possible?
Neuman: I do, and I’m a cockeyed optimist, so I’m going to keep asking the question until I get a no. I assume it’s yes until I get to no with somebody. I think the community, and I’m talking about the professional leaders in the community, if we want to survive, we have to work in a different way together, and we have to help each other more.
Maybe my bubble will be burst after I start meeting one-on-one with the community professionals, and I’ll get pushback, but I think right now there’s a platform for dialogue at this particular moment in the Jewish agency universe to really come to the table and put our separate agendas aside — not on the back burner — but aside and really think more like a think tank, if you will.
JT: I look at the listings for the J in our own calendar, and there are collaborations happening. A children’s program in December, for instance.
Neuman: It’s starting, it is starting.
JT: Does it need to be much more than that, or are just the low-level programs enough?
Neuman: I think grassroots is a very powerful way to move big mountains, and so I think it could potentially work better by starting with small programs, and being critical about evaluating the effectiveness of those: Did we do everything we thought we would do, where did we fall short? Again, those data points along the way glean hope for something bigger, and I think it’s really hard to start way up at the top with this macro giant goal and chip away at it, so I think that on the ground is some of the best learning and certainly can be modeled for the future.
I think this Hanukkah we’re working collaboratively. The JCC and the Federation are putting together a community Hanukkah gathering. In the past that’s been “a JCC program.” How can we make it better and more enriching by going broader with other partner agencies? There will be other agencies involved in that as well. I think that’s a step in the right direction. I didn’t have anything to do with that, but I think it’s a step in the right direction.
JT: Any tough choices you’ll have to make early on?
Neuman: Well there’s always financial tough choices. I wish somebody could wave a fairy wand and say, “don’t worry about the finances.” There are always tough choices. As a professional now in the Jewish community and running an agency, and the board, we have a stewardship responsibility and we have a fiduciary responsibility, and I think that’s always challenging being able to do as much as you want to do and figuring out how you can fund it accurately and where you take the risks and where you don’t and what requires seed money and seed energy to see if there’s something really there that can become sustaining on its own. So I think it’s trial and error. Those are always tough choices around what can you really and do well versus what you really want to do and do big. Those are different things and you have to really weave in and out of that. And there’s tough choices along the way.
JT: Paying attention to the JCC, I’ve sort of seen a lot of fits and starts, false starts and layoffs — just a lot of issues with the money. Knowing that the silent phase of its building campaign is underway, how can the J get out of this model of spending 10 years trying to do a capital campaign but not getting there, and almost being left behind in the community? Where is the J right now and what needs to happen?
Neuman: I think the J is in a very good place, in that we’ve got a cleaned up and strong foundation. We have a driven and passionate and unbelievably committed board. I’ve worked with a lot of boards; as a lay leader I’ve been on those boards and loved those boards. I’ll tell you, this is a group of people that have J blood running through their veins. I mean, they are really passionately committed and they’re being extraordinarily thoughtful about how to move forward not just on the capital campaign side, but also around, I think, filling the CEO role.
The whole search process, which I know you’ve covered in previous articles, and we appreciate that, was so methodically and professionally and earnestly managed. That gave me a really good glimmer as to how they’re governing and managing the agency. So going forward, yeah, there have been fits and starts and everybody’s waiting to see the fruit of the labor. They’ve done the right thing, meaning they the board, in putting the blocks in place. So my coming in now, fundraising will be a critical role, as it is with any nonprofit [executive director] or CEO, but that’s not the only thing to focus on, because really you’ve got to be able to speak to why you need money, right? Prove why you need it and how you know that, raise the money and then deliver and execute and implement flawlessly. That takes time.
I don’t think there are expectations that I walk in the door and I go start soliciting people tomorrow. It’s relationship building, that’s what I enjoy doing and that’s what I know other people inside the J enjoy doing, and so it’s telling our story and it’s figuring out the path for our future and then getting this community to support it. Again, I’m very optimistic, I’m not trying to skirt the question but three weeks into it I’m not going to lay out a campaign promise or plan. We have a momentum and we’re doing fact-finding. We’re fact finding and we’re talking to people and we’ll get there.
JT: In talking to people around the community, what I learned you weren’t interested in this job unless you were given the opportunity to make this a true center for the community.
Neuman: I think I have to prove myself and my way through that, but I feel like I do have not a blank slate, because there’s so much good going on, there’s really solid foundation, but I think I have a lot of latitude in working with my board and with the professional team in what right looks like for the future, and taking the cultural, recreational, social, educational components of our mission from really an outreach perspective and a service perspective, and moving it beyond the walls of Mercer Island.
Like it or not, that’s where the building was built, and it’s important to have a facility, “a center” where people can gather and come and participate as they see fit. It’s also important, as our demographics have moved so dramatically over the last 20 years in greater Seattle, not to exclude the rest of the community that either does not live within a five-mile radius or doesn’t want to schlep over two bridges. There certainly is no shortage of bricks and mortar in greater Seattle.
It’s a matter of where do you do programming, how do you do programming, and if you need four walls, how can you partner? Again, it’s back to that partnership to deliver that in places where people have easy access to. A JCC engagement is so much less about the building and so much more about the experience. We’re a very experiential model, and we should be, right? So you should walk in and feel it and touch it and see it and do it and participate in it. We’re not passive, we’re active. So how do you take that activity to the community is part of the puzzle.
JT: But does that hold true when we’re talking about things like the health club? A lot of people think of the JCC as a place to go work out.
Neuman: Well do they really? Certainly we have a core group of members where that is their gym, and that is their J gym — I wish I had the discipline they have to come every day and do what they do.
JT: Barry was teaching spinning… [Barry Sohn, the JCC’s former executive director]
Neuman: I’m not sure I’ll be doing that. But again, think about when the model of this JCC and including the health club was built, there clearly weren’t as many options for fitness facilities in our community, so it’s a very important ingredient, but it’s not the only ingredient, and sometimes I think people think of the JCC here as bookends: We have our ECS, our early childhood school on one side, and we have the health club on the other, and we have this whole middle part with real engagement opportunity. That’s where we need to focus a lot of energy. We have really good models on the bookends, but we’ve got a big vessel to fill.
JT: I think in a lot of ways it was by design. In trying to get the budget to work. a lot of those programs in the middle were cut.
Neuman: Right, right.
JT: So I suppose you have to start filling up those holes again.
Neuman: That’s right, that’s right, and I think that’s the exciting part. I also think that from a macro environmental scan, if you will — this is my own opinion, so I don’t have any data to back this up — but looking at where the world has gone, and where we are today, if there was ever a time and a case to be made for coming back to a sense of community, for latching on, and for having a place and affinity to belong to — not from a membership perspective, more a psychological perspective — it’s now. People are hungry for human connection and interaction. People are hungry for a sense of family and community. I think we’ve all sort of come through the fog and as we look through to the other side, and I’m talking more about the economic fallout and all the negative stimulus out there, that people either need to go deep inside themselves, or they go deep inside of their homes, and they have this nesting sort of quality that it brings out in folks. And then they start to say, “Okay, where’s my circle of friends, where’s my circle of family?” And the J is the doorstep that can foster that, that can create a sense of extended family and community. So I would say it sort of comes full circle.
My mother, when I was young, used to say if clothes go out of style and you put them in a barrel, by the time the barrel’s full and you turn it over, those clothes are back in style again. I think it’s kind of a silly analogy, but kind of an anology of the J movement, of why it started in the first place, how it potentially lost its way over time or became diluted, and now you could certainly make an argument and a case for its relevancy coming back in a very big way in terms of sense of belonging and community. So I think we have a big opportunity. The window is open right now, and it’s up to us to make sure we capitalize on that.
JT: Where is the J in the JCC? What about the agency and its mission needs to be Jewish?
Neuman: I think the Jewish thread and the Jewish lens should weave through everything that we do. We don’t cater exclusively to the Jewish community. We have membership that is not Jewish, but they know that when they join this JCC that they’re joining an agency and an institution that does have a Jewish thread and a Jewish lens. I think it could be magnified from where it is today without being religious about it.
Within the Jewish world we’re very non-denominational, if you will. We have a big spread of people to create those relationships with. It gives us a lot of latitude. It’s also really challenging, right? You can’t be everything to everybody. But it’s important to this board, it’s important to our membership, it’s important to me personally — this is one of the reasons why I was attracted to the opportunity — to make sure that the Jewish values system, and the Jewish lens and the Jewish thread is woven deeply into everything we do, and sometimes that means just being in a room with a lot of Jewish people when working out or taking a spin class. Sometimes it means teens just hanging out in the teen lounge, not doing anything that could be considered hardcore Judaic, but they’re sitting in that room with other Jewish kids. That’s a start, right? That’s the tip of the iceberg. Then, how can we foster that deep sense of heritage and cultural richness that Judaism has to offer. I think that’s a great opportunity.
JT: Does that turn off the observant part of the community by not being religious?
Neuman: We’re not a religious institution. We’re not. There are other religious institutions. That’s what synagogues are for. That’s why you see on the contiuum of the plethora of Jewish education environments, from synagogue secondary education in Judaics to Orthodox schools to community Jewish schools and kind of everything in between. I think the beauty and frustration in Judaism is that we have this giant continuum. The beauty is that you can latch on in a place along that continuum that feels right for you. The challenge is to not let other people define that you’re either doing it right or doing it wrong.
JT: As much as you say that the center really isn’t predicated on the building itself, I do wonder what geographical limitations — the Jews in Queen Anne are not going to come to Mercer Island—
Neuman: I’ll interrupt you there. I think daily, you’re right. People are not going to sit in an hour’s worth of traffic and drive just because.
JT: Or West Seattle.
Neuman: I live in West Seattle. We’ve been making that drive for a long time. And further. So here’s the compelling argument, right? Not sort of “if we build it they will come,” but if you have something that’s really engaging and highly relevant, and offered at a time where the commute doesn’t get in your way, I do believe that people will come.
I think we have to look at frequency and reach, okay? So frequency and reach is when do you do it in that building in frequency and reach and when do you take it out into the community? Kavana is a beautiful example of a wonderful co-op around a great mission that isn’t dependent on a building, specifically. It’s a new model. I’m not saying the JCC follows that model exactly, but certainly if we’re going to limit all programming and activity to two facilities, because yes, we have the Mercer Island J, which is the larger footprint for what we offer, but we also have our collaboration and communal living with Temple Beth Am and an ECS program that has grown substantially over the last several years, and we’re starting to do more programming there as well. So we have to think creatively and not let physical space dictate what we can be to the community.
That said, a building — so now let’s get back to the building and let’s talk about Mercer Island specifically — when that building was designed, and many of the JCCs that were designed in that era 60 years ago, 40 years ago, community looked different. Today, to really create a sense of community inside the four walls, you need the space, the light, the air, the breadth to not only foster that sense but to actually program around that.
But if you look through our J, the community spaces are very fractioned. They’re very broken up, and there are long hallways, you go down this hallway, and someone could close their eyes and say, “If the physical space looked different and was more accommodating to both large and small numbers, think what you could do.” And I think that clearly is part of the vision of where do you go as the building needs to be kept up, renovated, remodeled.
JT: Does it need to be started over?
Neuman: I don’t think we’d take it to the ground.
JT: It seems like it would otherwise be impossible.
Neuman: I think it’s an architect’s challenge in terms of how you get more communal space out of the square footage. I look at it very similarly to remodeling a house. You ‘re buying a house when maybe you were a single person. And then you got married and then you started to have kids, potentially, and all of a sudden you went from a one-person home to a five-person home, and you didn’t necessarily want to move. How did you reallocate that space? Did you go up? Did you go out? Did you annex? Are you bundling people in rooms? It’s a similar thing. We have a great piece of property, and we have great bones to our building and we are really functioning at a very high level within the constraints of that physical space. So how do you use the space differently, how do you configure the space potentially differently that will allow you to do programming that you can’t do today?
JT: What sort of non-Jewish orgs do you think would be ones with which you would try and build relationships, for physical space and collaboration?
Neuman: Two thoughts come to mind initially, and one is as you look at the YMCA movement and the models of older YMCAs and newer YMCAs just in terms of the programs and services and the physical spaces that they offer. Again, thinking through brick and mortar, is there a way to partner, is there a way for reciprocity for using each other’s buildings? Are there schools that can be used in neighborhoods?
Back in the Jewish community, you’ve got everything from all the synagogues to Hillel to office buildings in which you could potentially have programming in after-hours. So I think what we will have to try really hard to do is not get myopic and sort of take off the blinders and look at all the possibilities.
I’m a big believer in proof of concept. So would I endorse trying 10 things in 10 different neighborhoods simultaneously? Probably not. But let’s expand programs into the community on a small scale. Let’s evaluate it with a really critical eye and let’s figure out what worked about that, what didn’t work about that, retrofit it, try again, try another. And again, that’s how you start to build momentum and how you start to get confidence, quite frankly, that what you have to offer is actually something people really want.
JT: Have you been in a situation where you’ve seen the situation get to the point of myopia that you’ve had to step back and break out? What happened?
Neuman: I think it happens to everyone naturally to everyone at different levels.
JT: You’re in a place, you get comfortable…
Neuman: You get comfortable! Those boxes have been sitting there for the last two years. You don’t see it because you walk by them every day. I might come in and see it and say, “Gee, could those go to offsite storage and give you more room? Could you put it in a cabinet so you don’t have to look at it every day?”
I think we’re all creatures of habit and there’s comfort in that. And so it’s traveling that fine line of being really comfortable in what you’re doing with just enough discomfort to keep you honest about what it is you’re not doing that you should get after. So yeah, I’ve seen it in my professional career, I’ve seen it in physical spaces, I’ve seen it in probably every nonprofit that I have volunteered in — you have a tendency to get complacent. But you can’t afford to if you want to be in business, you just can’t. And I think that’s really what the Jewish community is grappling with right now, not just in Seattle but nationally. Complacency has an end date.
Hopefully before you get right up against that curve you step back and say, “Okay, time to think bigger, time to think better, time to figure out how we’re going to get this done and, what are the possibilities?”
Leadership is an important part of creative thinking, and again, not creative thinking just from primarily a leader, but instilling that as a core competency across the organization. That’s what I hope to bring to the J as well.
JT: Do you feel like, given your experience, you can recognize when it’s starting to happen and get it before it gets bad?
Neuman: I don’t know that I’m any better than anybody else, but what I do subscribe to is the philosophy and the invitation to be held accountable, and have people call me out if I’m getting there — too complacent, or not delivering what I said would deliver, or not being transparent enough. All those things that kind of get in the way of the end goal. So I say bring it on. I welcome that. I want community feedback.
Some people would say, probably, “Oh, she’s still in the honeymoon phase, of course she wants feedback from everybody. But just wait until all she gets is critical feedback.”
You know what? It makes us stronger. It doesn’t mean that we necessarily take every piece of feedback and turn that into an action plan, but we certainly have to listen. And then we have to look across that listening “vat” and say, I’ve heard this 27 times. I only heard that once, heard this a bunch of times, maybe 270 times, we’ve got to be paying attention to that, because there’s some groundswell of idea or concern and we can’t turn a blind eye to it.
JT: Anything else to add?
Neuman: I’m thrilled to be in this place at this stage of the Stroum Jewish Community Center and everything that it holds for our community and for the community at large. The J is a jewel in our community, and it deserves to be in the crown. And I think it has been in different periods of its existence, and I hope and I’m charged with really bringing the luster back, again in a very relevant and meaningful way.
And that’s not to say there is no luster, I just don’t know that we’ve shown it to the community in as big a way as we can and have built from it.