“I’ve been very lucky,” said Steven H. Morrison, executive director of the Madison Jewish Community Council. “I’ve had two wonderful experiences.”
Those two experiences were working for B’nai B’rith International in Washington, D.C., for 15 years, and serving as the Madison community’s executive director since 1984.
In spite of those 40 years of service, he was not thinking about winning the Association of Jewish Community Organization Professionals’ Mandelkorn Distinguished Service Award, though he has served on the awards committee and knew he had been nominated.
Most of the past winners, Morrison told The Chronicle in a telephone interview, have been executives of intermediate or large city communities, rather than of small ones like Madison, “and I knew most all of them, including [the late] Ben Mandelkorn [AJCOP’s founding president and executive emeritus], for whom the award is named.”
So he felt “surprised, honored and humbled” when he received a telephone call on Sept. 26 telling him he had won the award. “Being recognized by one’s peers I find particularly gratifying,” he said. “After 40 years, it feels good.”
The award will be presented at AJCOP’s 38th annual meeting, which is scheduled to take place in Jerusalem in November.
Many achievements
According to a release from AJCOP, “the award is presented to a full-time Jewish community organization professional who has been in the field for more than 10 years, who contributes to the field, serves as a role model, displays a high level of personal and professional ethics and enjoys the esteem of colleagues, peers and lay leadership.”
And the AJCOP furnished two nominating letters that demonstrate the last listed qualification.
“He has been my friend and colleague for 18 years,” wrote Gloria Schwartz, executive director of the Springfield Jewish Federation in Illinois, “and I think he deserves this award for his awesome work for the good of the Jewish people everywhere.”
“It has been my privilege to know Steve Morrison for 16 years,” wrote Steven Terner, executive director of the Columbia Jewish Federation in South Carolina. “I have seen him mentor men and women equally, and his sage advice is respected.… I support his nomination without qualification.”
The AJCOP also furnished information about Morrison’s many achievements during his tenure in Madison. These include:
• The MJCC raised $513,000 in its annual campaign of 1983, the year before Morrison took over. In 2007, it raised $945,000 for an increase of 84 percent.
• The MJCC had an endowment of $110,000 in 1984. It now has $1.67 million.
This financial record was so impressive that the United Jewish Communities, the umbrella organization for North American Jewish federations, gave the MJCC its Sapir Award for financial resource development excellence in 2006.
• Under his leadership, the MJCC in 1999 acquired the Irwin A. and Robert D. Goodman Jewish Community Campus in Verona.
• Morrison oversees the delivery of services to Jewish Social Services clients — about 1,000 a year, compared to 100 in 1983 — and manages services to some 450 emigres from the former Soviet Union in Madison.
Morrison has also served in the general Madison community. He has been a member of Madison’s Equal Opportunities Commission since 1998; has chaired the Madison Metropolitan School District’s Superintendent’s Human Relations Advisory Council for nearly 20 years; and was appointed in 2003 to the Mayor’s Advisory Committee.
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