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November 5, 2004/Cheshvan 21 5765, Vol. 57, No. 10
'Bold new vision'
Jewish federation hopes to respond to community growth
LEISAH NAMM
Managing Editor
The Jewish Federation of Greater Phoenix is rethinking its role.
Faced with the rapid growth of the local Jewish community, federation leaders spent the summer reviewing the past five years' annual campaigns and conducted qualitative and quantitative analysis of the data.
The result?
"We have more than five consecutive years of non-growth, (and) we've not kept up with the growth of our population in terms of the number of donors," said Adam Schwartz, federation executive vice president. "There's been a tremendous spread between the growth of our agencies and our campaign - our agencies are growing much more rapidly than we have been able to respond."
Now the federation is taking action.
"We need to chart out a bold new vision," said Lanny Lahr, federation president. "We haven't changed the way we raise money for the community in at least 20 years."
Federation board members and strategic planning experts Natalie Lang and Joe Schwartz worked with Lahr and Adam Schwartz to review the federation's annual campaigns from 1999-2003.
"What we concluded was that we have an opportunity to rethink our situation (and) to renew ourselves," Lang said.
From this point forward, the year will be all about change, Adam Schwartz said. "This is about a total change in philosophy and focus." It's the federation's role "to be a catalyst for Jewish growth in this community."
From 1999 to 2003, the budgets of the federation's constituent agencies collectively grew by 94 percent, Schwartz said. That growth includes the addition of the Pardes Jewish Day School as a constituent agency and a significant increase in the Valley of the Sun Jewish Community Center's budget when it opened for business at the Ina Levine Jewish Community Campus in Scottsdale.
While the agencies' budgets have grown from $18 million to $36 million in those five years, the federation campaign has remained stagnant, actually declining about 6 percent - from almost $5.3 million to just under $5 million.
In 1997, the Greater Phoenix area had an estimated 34,000 Jewish households, or 63,900 individuals. By 2003, the population had grown to 44,900 households, or 82,900 individuals - a growth of more than 29 percent.
In contrast, the number of federation donors dropped 5 percent, from 5,068 to 4,813.
The local federation is not alone. A comparative analysis with other Western Jewish com-munities with similar populations - such as Las Vegas and San Diego - showed that they also are struggling to keep up with rapid growth, Schwartz said.
How does the federation plan to respond? First, federation leaders are updating its mission statement, which it last did in 1986, to better reflect current goals. Federa-tion contributors, traditionally called "donors," will now be "members," reflecting the move to transform the fed-eration into a membership-driven organization, Lahr said.
With this new mindset, federation leaders are rede-signing the solicitation pro-cess. In addition to contri-buting to the 2005 Campaign for Jewish Needs, with the federation allocating dollars to local, national and inter-national needs, members can have a say about any increased contributions they make.
"We are expanding our fund-raising effort to go beyond the notion of an unrestricted annual campaign exclusively," Schwartz said. "We're also going to engage in the work of raising funds for special projects and other needs throughout the community."
Another goal is to create a partnership plan to improve relationships between the federation and its constituent agencies (see box below).
The first three courses of action are community planning; communitywide leadership development and training; and changes in fund-raising.
"We have a wonderful opportunity ... to build a strong, cohesive, compre-hensive community," Schwartz said. "The community needs an organization to drive that, and we are that organization."
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