‘Reimagining’ Allied Jewish Federation into Colorado Jewish Foundation

ROSH HASHANAH
SECTION A

ABOUT a year from now, if all goes as planned, the Allied Jewish Federation of Colorado will cease to exist.

So will its symbiotic endowment arm, the Jewish Community Foundation.

At least in terms of names.

In their place will be a new/old entity by the name of the Colorado Jewish Foundation, which will continue the federation’s decades-old work as the Colorado Jewish community’s central fundraising, organizing and planning entity — and hopefully more.

To go along with the new name, the organization will have much the same mission it has had since its early days when it was known as the Central Jewish Council and Allied Jewish Council — to “inspire Jewish values and secure resources for a vibrant Jewish future” — but there will be new priorities, new directions and new ways of doing business.

“Reimagining Federation for the 21st Century” is the way the federation itself describes its exhaustive two-year process of seeking community input, self-examination, reinvention and renaming.

With a vote of confidence from the AJF’s coordinating committee, which has worked since 2010 on these new directions, the plan was unveiled to the Jewish community at the federation’s annual meeting on Aug. 30.

The plan is solid but by no means complete, says Doug Seserman, AJF president-CEO.

“We have unveiled a new direction,” he says. “The metaphor we’ve been using is, we’re a restaurant that is open for business as the federation but we’re doing a total major renovation while we’re staying open. A year from now we launch in this new direction.

“These things will happen, but there’s a lot of fleshing out we need to do. We have a kind of architectural plan and the house is framed.  But we need the walls up, we need to decorate it, we need to really bring it to life so that people can understand the concept.”

In other words, the federation’s course for the future remains more a dynamic process than a done deal.

Nancy Gart, who chairs both the AJF’s coordinating council and the “Reimagining Process,” the volunteer group that she describes as the “design team” for the idea, emphasizes the fluidity of the transition.

“We have to see what’s realistic and what we can really do,” she says.

“There are some unknowns. Rather than have the coordinating council just adopt it, we decided on a vote of confidence to continue our work — and really, the work is just starting as far as I’m concerned — to move forward, to really flesh it out and build the walls.”

Gart, as a lay leader, and Seserman, as a professional leader, have been the point people on the process.

In a joint interview with the Intermountain Jewish News, they expressed full agreement that the best time for this major shift is now.

“The reason we started it at the time we did is because we were starting from a position of strength and stability,” Gart says.

Adds Seserman: “Underlying all this are some megatrends that we need to face, around people’s Jewish affiliation; the choices that Jewish people have for their charitable money; the dynamic between the agencies and the federation, locally and overseas; generational shifts in attitude between the older-than-the-State-of-Israel generation and the younger-than-the-state of Israel generation.

“A confluence of all these factors led us to try to take on this big project from a position of strength and stability.”

STRENGTH and stability notwithstanding, the federation is being remarkably open in acknowledging that among the many things it has learned about itself in the last two years are these important ideas: The community is not satisfied with the federation as it presently exists, and it is ready for a high level of change.

As the Jewish community itself changes, the federation has to change, Gart and Seserman say. Remaining relevant to its target community is the federation’s best assurance of sustainability.

Gart puts it in even blunter terms: “If we don’t do this reimagining work we run the risk of becoming obsolete over time.”

These are only two of the many “learnings” the federation has acquired in the process to date.

The learning, Gart says, has come straight from the community itself, and the community was pointedly asked to take its gloves off.

“If they have said negative things about federation we have not put the buts in there,” she says. “We have just gone out there and listened.”

Among the uncomfortable but important things the community told the federation is that while it has relatively high name recognition and is seen as important, the community has something of a “neutral” attitude — meaning not especially bad or especially good — about it.

There is also a discernable lack of understanding of what the federation actually does in the community.

This was especially so when community members were asked about the Jewish Community Foundation and a number of programs that the federation not only funds but runs directly — the Young Leadership program, the Jewish Community Relations Council and the Israel shaliach program, in particular.

The willingness not only to listen to but to solicit such frank criticism itself represents an evolution for the federation, Seserman says.

“Inside of federation we would say that we’ve always tried to be open to what the community’s needs are. We want to be very open but we do understand that there’s a perception — and perception is reality for people — that maybe we’re more closed than we think we are.

“Some of the feedback we got was that some people’s perception of us was different than how we perceive ourselves. We wanted to be very inclusive and open to the feedback from the community.”

Two online surveys reached over 1,000 people; focus groups and individual interviews reached another 120 people; meetings with major donors, agency executives and leaders of Rose Community Foundation brought in even more input.

“In other words, we’ve talked to anybody who would listen to us,” Gart says, “and we’re hoping to have more and more of these conversations.”

“The numbers are staggering,” Seserman adds.

“Between the one-on-one interviews with focus groups and the online surveys, we literally have data from over 1,350 people. It’s a very robust data set. There’s a lot of information that has helped guide the direction of where this future is, which has given us confidence that we’re more in the right direction than the wrong direction.”

A CRUCIAL part of finding that new direction was the way the design team projected scenarios as part of its strategic plan, starting up with a wide-range of 10 scenarios that “were as bold as shutting our doors, to mergers, to all kinds of things in between,” Gart says.

The 10 scenarios were reduced to three, and finally to one scenario that delineated five focus areas:

— Empowering Jewish philanthropy;

— Engaging the next generation in being Jewish;

— Serving the most vulnerable;

— Supporting and advocating on behalf of Israel;

— Mobilizing the community in times of crisis.

If those focus areas sound familiar — if, in fact, they sound pretty much like what the Allied Jewish Federation has always prioritized — then Seserman would say the point is getting across properly.

“The work of this new entity is totally consistent with the old entity,” he says.

“The mission really isn’t changed. There was never anything wrong with our mission. It was tactically how we were going about how to achieve that mission and the relationship with the local and overseas organizations that we partner with.”

In short: “It’s how we’re doing it.”

An excellent example is the way in which the federation interacts with its beneficiary agencies. A crucial part of the “reimagining” process is an effort to remove the seeming paradox in which such agencies are both dependent upon and competitive with the federation.

“We live in a very competitive fundraising environment,” Gart says, “where our partner agencies have development directors and their development departments collectively outnumber ours.”

In the last couple of years, the federation has begun moving toward “program-based,” or gap funding, in which specified funding for specific agency programs replaces the old “entitlement allocation” system, in which an agency received a given sum annually and made its own decisions on how to spend it.

Gap funding is more cost efficient, tends to bring more tangible results and clears up a lot of philanthropic confusion.

“Many donors might ask us, ‘Why am I giving to you to give to the agency when I’m also giving to the agency separately or through you as a designated gift?’” Seserman explains.

“So we’ve been working on this evolution for program-based funding because what that says is that the money that agencies are using from federation is different from the money that they’re using directly. We’re filling the gap between the cost of running the program and the revenues they’re able to bring in. It’s important to have that partnership.”

Donors are tired of what Seserman calls the “natural infighting that’s part of the constructive tension” between the federation and beneficiary agencies.

“A lot of what’s in [the federation’s new model] is shifting from a competitive relationship with our partner agencies to a complementary and collaborative relationship with those partners,” he says.

“People aren’t happy with the current model around how the community works with each other. It’s not rewarding to anybody to the level they would like it to be. There’s a readiness for change.”

THE same readiness for change seems apparent in the community’s expressed desire for more say in how their donations to the federation are spent.

Donor-advised funds and the federation’s Total Choice Tzedakah program have been used for several years to address those desires, but the communal feedback seems lukewarm about them so far, describing them as having garnered “mixed results.”

Although the federation has no intention of totally surrendering its own allocation decisions — or, as Gart puts it, “we’re still looking for flagship gifts as the heart of the federation operation” — it seems clear that more donor control is going to be an increasing part of the institution’s future.

“We’ve tried a lot of creative things to recognize that the environment has changed and try to give donors the opportunity to give in their ways while still trying to plan for the future,” Seserman says.

“It’s not as though these different initiatives haven’t really worked, because a lot has worked, but it’s not like they’ve necessarily been the panacea either.”

Just how to readjust the balance of federation and donor control over allocations is one of the more immediate and pressing challenges of its current makeover.

Similar challenges lie in other areas that the federation considers crucial to its mission.

The federation has to face the fact that supporting Israel is no longer taken for granted as an almost genetic impulse, particularly among younger Jews, many of whom don’t have the same emotional attachment to Israel as their elders, while others might actively disagree with Israeli policies.

While acknowledging these changes, the federation has made a conscious choice that supporting Israel — both for its own sake and for its value in helping American Jews retain their identity — must remain a priority.

It intends to continue supporting the Israel Study Tour, Taglit-Birthright and young adult programming as “transformative programs for Jewish identity.”

Seserman advises community members not to expect a dramatic shift in federation’s current allocation balance, which divides roughly into overseas needs (including Israel), local needs and federation expenses.

“It’s too early,” he says, to anticipate a lowering of allocations for Israel in favor of allocations for local needs.

“In some of our other scenarios there was a more intentional shift one way or the other. You will still see us being very active being part of Klal Israel, [maintaining] a very important connection to Israel, both by bringing Israel to the community and supporting Israel with our partnerships.”

Likewise, the federation’s support for day schools — another allocation issue that comes up frequently — is unlikely to see any dramatic shift in the near future.

“Day schools surely are a piece of this but so too are summer camps and IST and our young adult programming and Taglit-Birthright and early childhood education,” Seserman says.

“With this new entity, we’ll be known as a foundation that’s making an impact and making sure that the next generation is engaged. We’ll work with lots of partners to do that.”

THE most immediately obvious of the new developments will be the decision to take the new name of Colorado Jewish Foundation, which the federation expects to formally adopt in late 2013.

While gaining that new name, the federation will give up its long-established name recognition as the Allied Jewish Federation.

Seserman and Gart are asked whether this is like going from “Coca-Cola” to “Brand X-Cola”?

“We’re hoping that we don’t experience the New Coke problem,” Seserman replies with a laugh.

“This does have that risk. We’ve had intellectually honest dialogue around trying to explain the upsides and downsides when you might change the name of an institution that is 66 years old and has lots of positive connotations.

“At the end of the day, it’s easier from a marketing standpoint to create perception than to change perception. This provides the opportunity for us to start anew and define our work fresh and free ourselves from the way people may have thought about it or not thought about it. But it does have a risk for those who are very comfortable with the old model. They will ask: Has it changed and is it still worthy of my support?”

The federation’s basic answers are no, it hasn’t changed in any substantial way, and yes, it’s still worthy of your support.

Seserman emphasizes that the new “CJF” will continue to do all of the AJF’s time-honored tasks, but without using the word “federation” to identify itself.

It will maintain its annual campaign, its allocation process, its endowment and its affiliation with the national federation movement, Jewish Federations of North America.

In legal and technical terms, the federation already qualifies as a “foundation” under state and federal statutes, so the new name is actually more accurate, Seserman says.

“We’re trying to retain all the good stuff about being a federation while moving toward the future in a more contemporary way that’s realistic with the environment in which we operate,” he says.

Seserman further suggests that names can sometimes grow outdated and inaccurate, and perhaps counterproductive to the mission.

“Allied” might have been in fashion during the WW II era, he says, but it seems outdated today.

He’s not sure when the term “federation” became popular in Jewish philanthropy, but most people today associate the word with “the good guys in Star Trek.”

“Today, people in the philanthropic environment understand that foundations have purposes,” Seserman says. “It’s a more contemporary expression.”

Although a risky move, he adds that the federation itself seems eager to lose its name in favor of another.

“There’s everything in a name and nothing in a name,” he says, “so it’s really not about the name. It’s about the work that we do. The brand itself creates just a halo or an image that helps support your work or detracts from it.

“The idea for us is to take this enterprise that’s known as the federation-foundation and our connection with the federation movement into a new entity that pulls all that together.”

THE key to understanding where the AJF — soon to be CJF — stands today is that it is entering waters that are largely uncharted. “It sounds like it’s moving in the right direction but we want more details,” Gart says.

“I think that there’s some confusion. One of the questions that we’ve been asked is, what are the differences?  We’ve really tried to be responsive to that. Our work is really just beginning. It’s easy to brainstorm but now we really have to put the nuts and bolts to it.”

In the federation’s Power Point presentation used at the recent annual meeting, under the heading “What will success look like?,” actual numbers are presented.

If “reimagining” works, the chart says, the current 2012 campaign of $10 million (down a bit from last year) should rise to $11 million by 2017, representing a 10% increase.

The current Jewish Community Foundation (endowment) would jump from $40 million today to $80 million by 2017, a 100% improvement.

Less numerically and more substantially, what role do its present-day creators envision the Colorado Jewish Foundation playing in the lives of future Colorado Jews?

“Hopefully, they will be assured that their grandchildren and the next generation will have a strong vibrant community to live in,” Gart says, “and that the federation will be nimble enough to provide services where they’re needed in a timely manner. And that it will be a wonderful place to be Jewish. I think that is the over-arching goal.”

Seserman tackles the question in terms of long-term sustainability.

“No matter what flavor of Jew I am, I feel like I connect and belong to this community and that this institution welcomes me and my participation and has an eye toward the future of Jewish modernity, if you will.

“This is a community of modernity, but we need to work to ensure the continuity of the Jewish people. It’s not something we can just take for granted. We have got to embrace the fabric and develop an approach to the future.”

Copyright © 2012 by the Intermountain Jewish News