FIDDLING

The Global Planning Table Committee met by phone on October 20 to listen (I guess that's what that Committee does) to "recommendations on the 'split'" of core allocations dollars between the Jewish Agency and Joint. I don't know what the results were/are but the materials sent to the Committee the morning of the meeting (!!) were sufficiently confusing as to only raise serious questions and yield the obvious conclusion that JFNA/GPT are, like Nero, fiddling while Rome is burning -- you were expecting something different?

• While federation annual campaigns, with no assistance or direction whatsoever from JFNA, have increased since 2011, core allocations have dropped over the same period from $139,200,000 in 2011 to a projected $120,200,000 this calendar year -- a 14% reduction to the lowest point...EVER. 
• Somehow JFNA advanced $2.9 million from its own "reserves" to core in 2012, federations then advanced $2.3 million (net) in 2013 but, apparently, that $5.2 million will be deducted from federation allocations in 2014? Huh? Where wqas this deduction voted upon? By whom? Why?
• JAFI and JDC and World ORT will each receive the lowest core allocations from the federations that they have ever received...that's EVER. Each and every year, for the last 8 years and more, these core allocations have reached a succession of new lows year-by-year.

Here are some of the b.s. you would hear were you on the Committee:

• The overseas beneficiaries (to continue to call JAFI/JDC/ORT "partners" under the circumstances is blasphemy) should not complain, look how much they received from the "Stop the Sirens" and "Save the Ukraine" "campaigns." This is, of course, so facile and so false. These emergency dollars went directly to program, often to third party service providers, so to attempt to "count" special campaign distributions is a rationalization of failure, pure and simple. (And, never forget, in that last Terrorists' War, the federations [not JFNA...never JFNA] raised over $300,000.000; the War this Summer yielded maybe...maybe...a claimed $50 million, far more than the JFNA "target" and JFNA has not even seen that much.);
• "We're projecting an increase in core allocations in 2015." On the basis of what, prayer? (That projection would somehow see a decrease in ORT's allocation.)
• "We think the split should change." In its first year, the then ONAD (Overseas Needs and Distributions Committee), later to become as big a failure as the GPT has been from its beginning, was under the thoughtful and respected leadership of New York's Alan Jaffe. Its recommendation was that allocations divisions among the then partners (for that is how JA/JDC were then treated) should not be changed at a time of decreasing allocations. Later that would be reflected in both federation recommendations and the agreement of JAFI/JDC rejected unilaterally by Kathy Manning for reasons never explained -- that increased allocations be divided 50/50. Although a number of federation leaders who supported a freeze on core changes back then retain their great influence on the failure that is the GPT, I doubt they even remember where they stood then let alone stand up and fight for what they surely believe to be a matter of principle.

I have no doubt that the Neros who lead our wreck of a system today will call for significant modification of core allocations. I also have no doubt that the federations, the "market," if you will, will continue to make their allocations decisions as they have. JFNA has abandoned core allocations advocacy; the GPT leadership has given that advocacy its usual lip service without follow up. And CEO What's-Advocacy, will continue his uninformed silence as JFNA marches further in its pursuit of irrelevance.

The balagan continues.

Rwexler