|
|
Federations taking control of combined new entity
JULIA GOLDMAN
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
NEW YORK - As 1998 winds to a close, the leaders of the United Jewish Appeal and local Jewish federations are gearing up to complete the overhaul of American Jewry's central fund-raising establishment.
This month, an outside facilitator, Jeffrey Solomon, began meeting with top professionals at UJA and the Council of Jewish Federations to keep their merger from idling on the way to a self-imposed year-end deadline. When it emerges after nearly a decade of conceptual planning, the new entity - born of the union of UJA, CJF and the United Israel Appeal - will have a single chief professional officer and a unified organizational structure. It will also have a new system of governance that puts federations squarely in the driver's seat of North America's primary Jewish charity, which raises more than $1 billion a year for Jewish needs, both nationally and overseas.
"I think it's appropriate that the federations control the system," Dr. Conrad Giles of Detroit, CJF's president, said in a telephone interview. "It is their system. They are paying for it, and whatever sense of loss of control they have had in the past is regrettable."
That sense, he explained, grew out of a perception that the national organizations, although supported by local federations, were not responding to the communities' needs. As a result, an increasing number of federations began to demand a louder voice and a greater share in deciding how funds would be allocated here and in Europe and Israel.
Last month in Washington, a three-day quarterly meeting of the UJA-CJF-UIA partnership, which currently is being called the UJA Federations of North America, yielded a basic outline for operations. It gives federations a majority voice in the partnership's governing bodies.
"I'm convinced that with the ownership of the new organization," Giles said, federations "will also accept the responsibility of making certain that the system does its best for all of its members."
Still to be resolved are several potential sticking points. For example, the structure and function of committees will reflect widely debated issues, such as the need for a Jewish renaissance committee to address concerns about education and continuity or a committee to oversee and secure funding for national social-service agencies. Moreover, a recommendation endorsed by the committee drafting the plans for the new entity centers on one of the merger's most divisive issues: collective responsibility - the degree to which federations should be obligated to contribute at set levels to nationally determined fund-raising priorities.
The drafting committee's report proposes that communities voluntarily commit to maintain current levels of overseas allocations for the next two years to provide security for agencies administering funds abroad, namely the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and the Jewish Agency for Israel.
Significantly, the drafting committee's report represents "an effort rising up by those who will own the organization" rather than a "top-down effort," UJA President Richard Wexler of Chicago said.
|
