Federation explores resource development
By Paul Haist
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Crawl into bed at night and speak the words “collaborative financial resource development” and you might not need your Ambien or your Excedrin PM.
Since the Jewish Federation of Greater Portland began exploring the concept of collaborative financial resource development—usually referred to now simply as FRD—as an alternative to reliance on a traditional single-stream annual fund-raising campaign to support communal needs, a number of people have gone to considerable length to clarify the concept for the whole community, including here in the Jewish Review.
However, many all across the Jewish community remain a little mystified by the idea. Many others still have not heard about the project, which is intended to transform how the Jewish community takes care of itself in a time and environment in which such transformation has become vitally necessary.
Priscilla Kostiner is a past JFGP president who was named financial resource development chair in 2005 with a charge to “work with various task forces to develop a new model for maximizing resources to address the priorities of the entire Jewish community.” That’s how it was reported here in November 2005.
“We’re not going to do business as usual,” said Kostiner. “What we’ve done over the past many years has worked thus far, but we’re ready to change strategy.”
The JFGP has been consistently successful in raising funds to meet communal needs here and elsewhere around the world. So, why fix it if isn’t broken?
The concept of collaborative FRD was formalized within the United Jewish Communities, the national umbrella organization for local federations, in response to what had become an all too apparent new reality. UJC presented the FRD idea to the federations and named several pilot communities where local leadership agreed to explore the concept. Portland is one of those pilot communities.
A UJC team led by Beverly Woznica explained why it is necessary to fix what may until now have appeared not to be broken.
“While we are experiencing the greatest transfer of wealth in history, we also see increasing competition, an aging donor base, general plateauing of federations’ annual campaigns and interest in impact-giving by the next generation,” wrote Woznica and her colleagues in a recent letter to JFGP President Robert Philip and Executive Vice President Charles Schiffman.
Restated, what Woznica and her team meant was that lots of aging Jews are making decisions now about how to distribute the wealth they have accumulated through their labor and industry, while at the same time there are many more Jewish and other organizations seeking funds also sought by Jewish federations, while federation annual campaign revenue growth has been slowing, at best, and younger Jews want to have more say in where their philanthropic dollars are directed.
In short, the old model of Jewish federations raising money and then drawing on the collective wisdom of the community to decide how to distribute that money isn’t working so well anymore.
Portland’s Jewish federation stands out as consistently successful in its campaigns, but, say Jewish leaders, the trend described by Woznica is real and needs to be addressed now.
JFGP Campaign Director Laurie Rogoway put it this way, “For years the federation has been successful, but we are a business and businesses must adapt to changing times.”
“For years,” she added, “federation has identified needs, and donors have been content to allow the federation to determine where their gifts are directed. But many of today’s donors want to play a more active role in determining where their philanthropic dollars go.”
Kostiner went to the heart of the changing dynamic.
“It’s really about relationships and needs and continuing to build community by staying in touch with community,” she said.
Eric Rosenfeld is a co-chair of the federation’s FRD Task Force and has explored options for federation collaboration with other institutions in the Jewish community. He summarized what is meant by collaboration in the new model.
The objective, he said, is “to broaden fund-raising efforts by the federation to include other elements of the community such as synagogues and Jewish agencies, to take an integrated approach and show that our community is working together and not inundating our donors with competing choices.”
He spelled out three areas of collaboration.
He called the first area “community development” which aims for “an integrated and coordinated approach to donors that provides them with a menu of community