Following an intense period of study and discussion, the Milwaukee Jewish Federation will make a significant shift to a support role, acting as convener and consultant to the people, agencies and organizations of the Milwaukee Jewish community as they work to meet the community’s evolving needs.
To bolster its success in this new role, MJF will continue and enhance its functions of identifying community needs and fundraising to meet those needs.
This change in direction for MJF was an outcome of its Strategic Action Session (SAS), held Aug. 2-3 at Congregation Sinai in Fox Point. The SAS was a culminating event in MJF’s Reimagining Project, inaugurated last April.
While the Jewish Community Summit, a prior event in the reimagining process held at the Milwaukee Public Museum June 26-27, worked to ascertain the community’s hopes and dreams for its own future, the SAS focused upon restructuring the Federation itself to better serve the community in achieving its aspirations.
“We did not get that far, to have a detailed, definitive plan,” said Sheryl Primakow, now interim MJF executive director, in a telephone interview Aug. 5. “But we did get direction — seeing Federation as a support for the community.”
Primakow said this meant both narrowing and broadening the MJF’s focus.
“We now try to do as much as we possibly can for the community,” she said. “In one sense, we need to narrow our focus, and not spread ourselves so thin that we can’t carry out our functions well.”
“In another sense,” she continued, “we need to broaden the focus to be inclusive and supportive” of the entire community.
The 19 initiatives that emerged from the hopes and dreams of the community as they were expressed at the Milwaukee Jewish Summit, “told us the extent of the outreach the community is looking for,” Primakow said.
The proposed initiatives can be found online at www.thejewishsummit.org.
Primakow said that while the MJF will not undertake all the work required on the initiatives themselves, it will provide guidance and support in the process of bringing them to fruition. MJF will perform the role of “caregiver,” she said.
Read the rest of the story in the September issue.
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