By Joel Magalnick, Editor, JTNews
Jewish Family Service of Greater Seattle, which nearly four years ago began to reassess its place in the Jewish community, has been attempting the largest expansion in its history. This includes building a new, larger facility; creating an endowment; and broadening the services it offers. Though the agency has had to scale back its new plan, called Family Matters, and reassess its priorities in the wake of the teetering economy, Ken Weinberg, CEO of JFS, said that Family Matters is still on track.
“We are moving along; we are moving along the building, but we’re moving along very carefully, because the country is in a bad way,” Weinberg said.
The original plan called for a fundraising effort of more than $30 million, and in its initial “quiet phase” JFS obtained about $25 million — in pledges.
“Even I sort of occasionally get tricked by this,” Weinberg said. “$25 million in pledges is not $25 million in cash…. Of the $25 million, I think we’ve collected about $8 million.”
Of that $8 million, Weinberg said, about half has been put toward JFS programs. That includes the creation of the recently opened addiction treatment program, which the organization felt it could not delay in implementation, and for emergencies such as food vouchers, rent assistance and other programs for clients experiencing various degrees of financial difficulty.
Some of the money currently collected for the Family Matters campaign has been moved to JFS’ operations, Weinberg said, but only money that had been categorized as unrestricted.
“There were a fair number of donors who donated specifically for a building,” he said, “and we need to honor that.”
The other $4 million has been socked away for a new building in what Weinberg called “extremely conservative investments,” such as CDs, which, unlike the stock market and so many other investment vehicles today, have actually accrued value through interest.
JFS has been hoping to break ground on its new facility for close to two years. As the economy began to turn sour, however, the original design, a 35,000-square-foot structure that would have sat adjacent to the agency’s current Capitol Hill location, has been scaled back to 17,000 square feet. But the building will happen, and hopefully sooner rather than later, Weinberg said. A viable alternative, which JFS is pursuing, is to find an existing facility that would suit the agency’s needs.
A new building is necessary, Weinberg said, because JFS provides what he called “wraparound services,” in which a client in need of food from the food bank may also need domestic violence services.
“A person does not have to schlep from here to another building, to another site, greeted by another receptionist, another set of forms, all those kinds of things,” he said.
More importantly, though, the facility JFS is in can no longer fit all the services its clients need, particularly when the past year has seen a 20 percent overall increase in usage of those services.
“We’re maxed out,” Weinberg said. “We need to expand the food bank, and we can only do that in a new building.”