It might be the perfect storm for change in the Jewish community.
As the economic crisis has lashed the nonprofit sector, it has led to decreased donations to the Milwaukee Jewish Federation’s Annual Campaign, which translates to fewer dollars to allocate for local and global needs.
Spurred partially by that crisis, the Helen Bader Foundation recently announced significant changes to its local Jewish grant giving.
This new financial reality raises questions in Milwaukee that are being faced in Jewish communities nationwide:
With fewer dollars, how can we continue to support community members? How must we redefine community needs and reshape our infrastructure? What programs can we no longer support? How will the community change as a result of the current economic crisis?
According to Dr. Steven Windmueller, director of the Irwin Daniels School of Jewish Communal Service at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Los Angeles Campus, the economic crisis will leave the Jewish community looking very different than it has in the recent past.
“The full impact of the economic crisis may not be felt for years … but core institutions are being fundamentally reshaped and individual lifestyles reconstructed.
“These economic challenges threaten the existing infrastructure of the American Jewish community,” he wrote in “The Unfolding Economic Crisis: Its Devastating Implications for American Jewry,” a report published in July by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs.
The Helen Bader Foundation announced last month that it is permanently endowing the community day school tuition scholarship program. By putting aside $1 million per year for 10 years, the foundation hopes that the Jewish Day School Scholarship Fund will continue well beyond 2019.
Started after Helen Bader’s 1989’s death, the foundation is intended to last one generation and plans to “sunset” in 2019.
The foundation will continue its annual gift of $500,000 to the scholarship fund and, by creating the endowment, hopes to fund tuition scholarships “hopefully forever,” said Daniel J. Bader, foundation president.
As a result, however, the foundation will cease other local Jewish grant giving and close the Jewish Life and Learning program area. It will, however, continue to honor its multi-year commitments.
The foundation will also cease funding its Israel-based Early Childhood Development grants and plans to close its Israel office at the end of 2009. However, the foundation has committed to $5 million in grants to Israel over the next 10 years, Bader said.
The decisions were a result of a two-day strategic planning meeting with foundation staff and board members. Their eyes were on two facts: The foundation’s slated end in a decade; and its portfolio, which has suffered from the slumping economy.
(Unlike many other Jewish foundations, however, the Bader Foundation was not hurt by the Bernard Madoff scandal.)
The change will affect local organizations throughout the community, which have received $28 million over the last 17 years, Bader said in a July 6 letter to previous grant recipients.
“What [the Helen Bader Foundation] did for all of us was to provide a place for creativity, for people to try new things. They gave executive directors with great ideas a place to go and that’s what we’re going to be missing,” said Jane Gellman, a longtime community activist who has served in leadership positions in local and national Jewish organizations.
Bader agrees. “It’s going to be more difficult for [some organizations] to start new projects without our grant dollars.”
But, he clarified, the foundation’s grants were primarily not used for operational needs but were “project driven, for capital improvements or limited life projects.”
Day schools, for example, will need to ensure that they can support their operations without “project” grants they received from the Bader Foundation. But they also must trim their expenses to match a decrease in allocations from the federation.
“[Our community] will have to contract,” said Gellman, whose leadership positions include: outgoing chair of the Milwaukee Jewish Federation’s Annual Campaign; Milwaukee Jewish Day School board member; past president of the Harry & Rose Samson Family Jewish Community Center and Hillel Foundation-Milwaukee; and next president of the World Confederation of Jewish Community Centers.
“I think that the Jewish community had an ever growing number of things that we defined as needs in the past 20 years…. At a time of plenty, you can define more things that way but now we have to decide what is a want and what is a need,” she said.
“We haven’t done a population study since 1996 and I think we’ve shrunk dramatically.” Said Gellman, who is participating in a federation convened committee looking at the community’s future needs.
“Is this community big enough for three day schools? … Maybe this town is only big enough for two Reform congregations and one Conservative.”
Those questions are being asked nationally as communities reorganize. Results of that self-review process may be surprising, Windmueller wrote in his report:
“The infrastructure of the Jewish communal system will be forever altered; some Jewish institutions will not survive this crisis and others will seek to merge or be acquired by stronger organizational partners.”
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