The Secure Community Network has been a real gem. Last week, JFNA Board Chair, Mark Wilf, extolled SCN's value and noted the recognition it has received from, among others, the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI.
At its end, Mark made a plea for individual financial support for the SCN. For those, like the Board Chair, who have the capacity to help fund the SCN, b'hatzlacha.
Some history is in order.
The SCN was the brainchild of a few Large Cities, including, I state with pride, Chicago. At the JFNA Board meeting at which it was approved along with a relatively small budget considering the enormity of its charge, questions arose as to how the SCN would be financially supported. Its was John Ruskay, then the UJA-Federation of New York President and CEO, who demanded, in the gentle way in which he stated all things, that given the high, if not highest, priority of institutional and communal security, JFNA commit to include the SCN as an annual Budget obligation. And he received that commitment from Silverman and the then JFNA Board Chair.
And, that commitment lasted, as best I recall, for all of two years. Couldn't afford it any more. (This brought to mind my own experience as the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago's Budget Chair way back when. We had a strategic priorities process in which the local agencies ranked their annual budget requests in priority order. And, one local Yeshiva listed as its lowest priority "fire extinguishers" knowing that Federation would see that need as among the highest priorities.)
So, the Large Cities, over and above JFNA Dues, began to fund the SCN -- the SCN morphed into a communal financial obligation no longer the highest priority of the Continental system. Though they no longer know what it means, no longer a collective obligation.
The SCN, like every other national organization, first told by the national organization that "you are our responsibility," found itself with the need to hire a professional fund raiser to raise funds to meet its responsibilities to the system that underfunded it. So early this year the SCN engaged a good one.
If one asked JFNA's leaders to rank the organization's priorities, community and institutional security would be at or near the top of the list -- apparently only so long as JFNA doesn't have to pay for it.
G-d bless Mark and those who have with him written checks to the SCN and may Mark assure that the SCN is the highest priority of the federation system and assure its core support.
Rwexler
Richard and fellow readers of this blog, I am a long time reader, and it dawned on me that this is probably a tough time for you, Richard because the problems at JFNA are indeed plentiful, as you have articulated so well over the years.
ReplyDeleteJerry Silverman's performance notwithstanding, I think you need to tone it down a bit while Eric Fingerhut is getting his feet wet.
Give him a chance to get a sense of the organization that he was hired to fix.
Allow him 6 months to acquire some intel on his own.
See if he reaches out to people that don't work at 25 Broadway; who knows, he may even reach out to you.
My point is, give Eric a fighting chance, and then challenge him appropriately.
You might even start by making a list of observations and send it to him, as a prologue to a face to face meeting.
Create them -- see, the National Agencies -- then abandon them. That's the JFNA way. So simple. And the result is that every National Agency is now fund raising in the communities, cutting service staff so as to afford to hire a development director. Was this one of the purposes of that long-ago merger? JFNA seems to think so. "Not our problem."
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