By Joel Magalnick, Editor, JTNews
Though Seattle is often ahead of the curve when it comes to innovations in technology and community building, those advantages haven’t insulated the area from the downturn in the economy. Washington State has lagged behind recovery from this deep recession, and the delay has been manifested as budget cuts and reduced charitable giving throughout the state’s Jewish community. That calls into question whether the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle will be able to meet its fundraising goals set for the annual Community Campaign, the pot of money that gets allocated to local Jewish organizations as well as some in Israel and in other countries.
About a month before the end of the fiscal year, which marks the end of the 2010 community campaign, gifts are down between $200,000 and $400,000 over 2009, which itself had shrunk by close to 6 percent from the year before.
“It’s a confluence of the worst conditions you can imagine,” said Ron Leibsohn, the Federation’s board chair. “We’re in an economic downturn that’s affecting not just people and their jobs at the middle class or lower-paying jobs, it’s affecting people at the higher level as well, because many of them are investors and business people, and their business is off, and the free dollars able to make contributions are down as well.”
According to Federation CEO Richard Fruchter, what’s at issue is that many of the agency’s most influential donors — those whose annual donations reach into the tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars — have either delayed making a commitment or been unable to do so.
“There are quite a few people who are still holding back, waiting to see how the economy improves,” Fruchter said.
As of May 25, the Federation has raised $4.47 million. Keith Krivitzky, vice president of the Federation’s Center for Jewish Philanthropy, said that figure is slightly behind where the campaign stood last year at the same time. The organization set an initial goal of $5.75 million for 2010, equal to last year’s campaign total, but has since revised its projections downward to $5.35 million.
According to Krivitzky, because Seattle felt the effects of the recession later, and because the Federation decided to begin its 2009 campaign earlier than usual, before the economy tanked, “We finished our campaign…among the top-performing Federations in the country,” he said. “So now you play that out, this year is actually the year when things seem to have bottomed out.”
Should the campaign actually end in negative territory, cuts to both the Federation internally and to the agencies it benefits will likely be severe. The operating budget for Federation, passed by the Federation board on May 18 and based upon a conservative $5.26 million campaign total, takes that into account.
“There are going to be continuing cuts at the Federation in our overhead and staffing, and cost of operations and programming,” Leibsohn said. And “there will be substantial cuts in the allocations to various agencies.”
Given a smaller allocation, organizations such as the Seattle chapter of the American Jewish Committee, which received $12,100 in 2009, would need to do more of its own fundraising, eating into the time its staff spends on programming. Wendy Rosen, the AJC’s local executive director, said such a cut would result in reduced interfaith dialogue, Israel advocacy, and working with other ethnic groups.
“It would hurt,” Rosen said.
A bigger impact, however, would be on the AJC’s flagship program, the Seattle Jewish Film Festival.
“With the current economic climate, raising money for the arts has been incredibly brutal,” Rosen said. “We’re down to bare bones, and so we would have to look at things like [fewer] offerings or a shorter festival, or maybe not bringing in as many filmmakers — those kinds of things. We would just have to offer less.”
Which is why Federation officials are pushing hard between now and mid-summer, when the campaign concludes, to get people with the ability to do so to close the gap.
Leibsohn said he is “moderately optimistic” that community members will step up to prevent dramatic cuts from taking place.
“If it doesn’t happen in the next 30 days, then the other thing will happen, and that’s cuts across the board,” Leibsohn said. “Everybody is going to have to take some pain.”
The Federation has gotten much more aggressive and, officials say, efficient in the way they have tried to obtain more donors and donations. Methods have included renewing professional affinity groups, the use of targeted e-mail campaigns, and more recruiting and training of volunteers to make better use of their strengths.
The methods have borne fruit: Krivitzky can count approximately 460 donations this year from people without any previous Federation involvement, and nearly 300 last year. But while that new engagement bodes well for campaigns down the line, the numbers probably won’t make up for the biggest donations that are still, thus far, uncommitted.
“It’s unlikely that the value of all of the new gifts that we get in is going to make up for a potential shortfall if people are hurting or people are cutting back or scaling back their gifts,” Krivitzky said. “It’s going to be a very busy, hopefully very effective push between now and the end of the year,”
Leibsohn would like to see a 10 percent, across-the-board donation increase to push the campaign to its previous level.
“A lot of people are maxed out, but a lot of people can give 10 percent plus some,” he asserted. “Everybody’s going to have to step up and do their portion…. If we have a hole, as it looks like there could be now, without the response…then we’re going to have to go back and revisit everything we’re doing.”
Fruchter, the Federation’s CEO, said that at a time when many people are suffering through economic, and oftentimes by extension, family difficulties, “there are always increased needs and less resources.” A smaller campaign intake would have a further effect on the Jewish agencies both locally and in places like the Ukraine and Russia that provide these resources.
“For most of our charitable partners here in Seattle, we are the largest single source of unrestricted support that they get,” Krivitzky said.
Fruchter said he has been in contact with the agencies to let them know their piece of the pie would be smaller.
“It’s not going to be that we’re going to cut off an arm or a leg, it’s going to mean that there will be less money overall, and we’re always giving money based on how the agencies are delivering services that are priorities for us,” he said.
In past years, following the institution of a more objective need-based allocations method, each beneficiary was guaranteed 75 percent of what it received in the previous year. Now, due to both economic pressures and a refinement of that process, that guarantee has been reduced to 50 percent, with the rest based on performance and improvements.
Leibsohn believes that given the economy, however, “our very scientific method of looking at [allocations] is going to have some human feeling put into it a little more than in previous years.”
A mantra familiar to Jewish professionals these days has been “do more with less.” Laurie Warshal Cohen, co-executive director of the Washington State Holocaust Education Resource Center, which received $7,500 from last year’s campaign, said her organization has seen its allocation drop over the past several years, but because awareness of genocide education has been growing, they have had to adjust in kind.
“We use more of our time in our fundraising efforts and we have to use interns and volunteers, because the demand for our work is increasing,” Cohen said.
Yonah Karp, board president of the Seattle Jewish Community School, said she understands that a smaller allocation could reflect the state of charitable giving across the Jewish community, but said her school, which received $56,200 last year, would put more effort toward its own fundraising before making any types of budgetary reductions.
“We will do everything in our power not to cut programs. That’s critical,” she said.
“We do have a pretty generous donor base,” Karp added, though “it’s hard to keep coming back to them.”