As of Feb. 1, Caren B. Goldberg became the executive director of the Jewish Community Foundation, the endowment development program of the Milwaukee Jewish Federation. She follows Bert L. Bilsky, who has held the position since 1980.
The foundation, currently chaired by David Lubar, was established in 1973 with $850,000 in assets. In 1975, it had a total of 35 funds, including unrestricted, restricted and philanthropic funds. Today, JCF assets total more than $100 million in more than 850 funds, including unrestricted, restricted, philanthropic, charitable gift annuities, and remainder trusts.
Goldberg, nee Berg, studied Hebrew and political science and earned a law degree at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She has worked for the JCF for 14 years. She is married and has three college student children.
On Jan. 14, Chronicle editor Leon Cohen spoke with Goldberg, 52, about her background and her goals and plans for the foundation. Selected and edited excerpts of that conversation follow:
Let’s start with your background and all the biographical stuff.
I was born and raised in Milwaukee. I grew up at Congregation Beth Israel [and] I taught Sunday school there, and I went to the East Side Hebrew School. I loved studying Hebrew.
When I was in eighth grade, my parents took us on a family trip to Israel, and I fell in love with the country. Then I took Hebrew at Nicolet High School. I was a member of Habonim, which is a Labor Zionist youth group. I went to Midrasha [Hebrew High School], and I went on a trip to [Jewish] New York City when I was maybe 15; that was a really inspiring and moving experience for me, to see the Jewish history as it played out in New York.
What do you think got you interested in all of this in the first place?
It was my parents, my grandparents — my grandfather was a cantor. And celebrating the Jewish holidays was a really big part of my growing up. My mom had a deep Jewish upbringing, and [she and my father] both went to Jewish camps, and they passed that on. [Eventually] I went on a Habonim workshop [in Israel] and lived in Israel for a year.
What made you decide to go to law school?
I was a political science major in college. I just became interested in studying the law. I actually thought I wanted to be a criminal lawyer, but never practiced criminal law. I did practice law for 12 years [specializing in] commercial litigation.
Then I got a call from a friend saying there was a position at the Jewish Community Foundation, and she thought I would be a good fit; and it was a good fit for me. It combined my legal skills with my passion for Jewish life and Jewish community. And I’ve been here ever since.
You are building up funds from which to generate income for the Milwaukee Jewish Federation and other Jewish projects. But this is not a directly Jewish content endeavor, is it? Or is it in some way?
It is building Jewish community; and it is supporting and growing the financial resources for Jewish life, hopefully in perpetuity, here and in Israel and overseas. It’s working with Jewish donors and trying to combine and match their philanthropic interests, passions, values, with the needs of the Jewish community.
The [Milwaukee Jewish Federation] annual campaign focuses on talking to people about gifts from their income to fund current needs. The foundation focuses on more on gifts of assets [and ways] to secure the future that goes beyond the annual gift to the campaign.
What is your vision of what you want to do as executive director?
My desire is to build on the successful 38-year history [of the foundation]. To continue to grow the base, to bring in new donors, and definitely to maximize the number of donors we meet with. I want to continue to create ways to help people fulfill their visions for our community through their philanthropy. We have a number of different planned giving vehicles, and I want to continue to try to make people aware of what they are, and help them figure out ways to best utilize those vehicles to help fulfill their dreams for our community.
[W]hat I’ve been instrumental in doing is creating the Book of Life program, where we recognize and honor people who have made a lasting commitment to the community. And I’ve worked on trying to bring programs to our professional advisors to help educate them, as they’re advising their clients in how they can work with the foundation.
This year we’re going to have a program [on May 19] and bring in a professional speaker to talk to our agency executives and their chief lay officers about endowment development, to help the agencies grow existing endowments and create new endowments.
And Bert will continue to work with donors. He has been extremely successful in developing relationships with donors. He’s been an incredible mentor to me. We’ve had a wonderful 14-year partnership, which will continue into the future.
How has the recent downturn in the economy affected the foundation?
We were down, and now we’re growing back. We’ve come through some challenging times. We’re still in challenging times.
But I think challenges create opportunities. And I try to look at those challenges as opportunities to go out and talk to people about what we’re doing, about what the needs are, about how we can help them and they can help the community. And we’ll continue to do that.
I think we’ve been successful and will continue to be successful going forward. But we’ll have to do some things in new ways.
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