The Wisconsin Jewish community’s influence on the national Jewish community relations field grew even further at the Jewish Council for Public Affairs plenum held in Washington, D.C., late last month.
That influence was already apparent with former Madisonian Hannah Rosenthal serving as executive director of the JCPA, the umbrella organization for Jewish community relations councils and other community relations agencies throughout the country. But it increased in two significant ways at the recent meeting.
First, Susan Friebert, the current president of the Milwaukee Jewish Council for Community Relations, was elected to the JCPA’s national board of directors for the first of a possible three one-year terms.
“It’s nice for us to have an executive director from Wisconsin and a board member,” said Paula Simon, executive director of MJCCR, a constituent agency of the Milwaukee Jewish Federation.
Second, the JCPA plenum adopted on Feb. 26 a “Resolution on Long-Term Care and Supportive Services for the Elderly” that is to a large extent a verbatim restatement of MJCCR’s “Statement on Older Adult Services,” which the agency created last year.
“I’m very proud of it,” Simon said, not only because of the “very hard” work that MJCCR’s Domestic Public Policy Task Force put into creating the statement, but also because of how the local statement embodies much national Jewish community thinking on this subject.
This group of issues “directly affects our population,” said Simon. “We have a very high percentage of older adults in this community.”
The MJCCR statement pointed out that older adults make up about 20 percent of both the local and national Jewish populations, compared to about 13 percent of both general populations.
Moreover, as Simon told a group of Wisconsin college students who were attending the Charlotte and Jack J. Spitzer B’nai B’rith Hillel Forum on Public Policy at the same time in Washington, “Every one of you will have an aging parent to deal with.”
In appreciation of that significance, MJCCR’s task force, staffed by MJCCR assistant director Barbara Beckert, “took a lot of time and studied the issues from a lot of different angles,” said Simon. Task force members interviewed planners at the federation, Jewish Family Services staff and many others, she said.
MJCCR submitted a draft national statement based on its local statement to JCPA’s Equal Opportunity and Social Justice Task Force. That statement and the final, approved draft both establish several principles that the two organizations feel should be applied to specific policy proposals. The principles include:
• “Affordability: Long-term care can be a costly and often severe financial burden…. [S]eniors often face financial hardships and cannot pay for essential housing, health care and other necessary services that would enable them to maintain their independence.”
• “Consumer choice: Older Americans need more and better choices about where they live and the kinds of services that best meet their needs, and assured access to religiously and culturally appropriate services…. Yet, the growth of managed care plans … has led to a loss of consumer choice.”
• “In-Home and Community-Based Care: To preserve independence, dignity and family ties, older Americans need greater options for receiving services in their own homes and communities, where many prefer to stay and where in fact costs are often lower than the cost of providing nursing home care.”
MJCCR helped to translate its position on services for older adults into direct advocacy soon after the plenum. The 50 women — 20 from Madison, 30 from Milwaukee — participating in the March 13 “Legislative Day in Madison” brought the MJCCR statement with them to their meetings with state legislators and Gov. Scott McCallum.
The participants used this and other MJCCR-provided materials to urge state officials to restore proposed budget reduction — from $33.5 million to $10.8 million — in the state Family Care program, which is being piloted in five counties, including Milwaukee County.
This experimental program “offers one flexible benefit for all long-term care services for older adults,” according to the briefing packet provided to participants. “The Family Care program is a top priority of our community and we urge that the needed dollars be restored to the Family Care budget,” the briefing paper states.
The council has issued an action alert on the state’s proposed budget cuts, which can be accessed on its web site, www.mjccr.org.
“I think some of the cuts will be restored, but not all of them will,” said Simon. She added that until the budget is completed by the end of June or later, it is difficult to know what or how much will be restored.
The Legislative Day in Madison was co-sponsored by the American Jewish Committee, Madison Jewish Community Council, MJCCR, National Council of Jewish Women-Milwaukee Section, Political Awareness Group and Presidents’ Conference of MJF’s Women’s Division, Rachel S. Jastrow Chapter of Hadassah and Wisconsin Jewish Conference.
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