Spin...Spin...Spin...
These are the most difficult of times for our community organizations -- most, if not all of them. Yes, there is so much to be proud of as in so many places, lay and professional leaders working together have rolled up their sleeves, worked so much harder just to remain in place. And, there is nothing to be ashamed of during this plague to have ended up where one started -- that's, in fact, an incredible thing...and took an amazing amount of work. And some did even better than that.
So, I really have to restrain my normal "urges" when I am on a Zoom call or hear of one on which some bloviating CEO or lay Chair paints a picture of prosperity when everyone, including that pro and that lay leader, knows should be the verbal equivalent of Munch's The Scream. Would the organization that CEO leads be negatively impacted if he/she chose to let their hair down, talk tachlis, and just say: "I need help...we need your help." And, if that CEO were really thoughtful, he/she might even say "We need your help, with this, with this, with this...
I remember back in the day, we were all in the depths of recession and I heard the message from communal CEOs across the country: "Never use the "r" word...never, ever. Everything is great, going well." Fooled no one. Back then, at UJA, we committed to working harder, longer; honing our message to meet the times with the brilliant professional leadership of Bernie Moskowitz and Gail Hyman. In too many places it was: "we'll wait this out and, when it's over, we'll come back." Those communities that took the UJA message of "work.harder.now" held their own and hit the ground running when the economy came back. The others...not so much.
Trust me, friends, our donors -- that's us you know -- can handle the truth. Thus, when I hear the highest levels of continental professional leadership with their lay partners bragging of the "amazing results" of their overseas advocacy that to them allowed the federations to claim that allocations to the core budgets of the overseas legacy partners were an "incredible success' thanks to "an incredible year-end effort" that resulted in the lowest allocations in recorded history, I want to put up that very same Munch Scream on the Zoom screen.
It would be a sorry circumstance indeed were amcha, in some sort of Orwellian mind-meld, to not only accept failure as success, but to brag about it.
JFNA and the federations have done some remarkable things -- its support for the Survivor community, the creation and funding leadership embodied in the funding partnership that is the Human Services Relief Matching Fund, are but two -- dwell on those, promote those. But to dwell on painting failure as success is humiliating, self-defeating and discrediting.
Stop it.
Rwexler
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2 comments:
Yes, "lay and professional leaders working together have rolled up their sleeves, worked so much harder just to remain in place." And yes, "there is nothing to be ashamed of during this plague to have ended up where one started -- that's, in fact, an incredible thing."
But not at JFNA. At JFNA, things have remained more or less as they were without any effort at all by anyone and in JFNA's case the fact that nothing has really changed is indeed something that we can all be ashamed of - very ashamed.
It probably isn't because of the spinning of the truth to make things look like they are a huge success - more a result of inertia and apathy of those that keep their dues flowing to an organization that should have changed exponentially long before this crisis set in.
There should have been and still need to be drastic budget cuts and extreme infrastructure and HR downsizing in New York and certainly in Israel - probably not so much in Washington, although someone should have a look there too (The fact that nobody seems to be looking anywhere is the core problem).
JFNA has stopped doing what it was designed to do and what it was supposed to do, so it should stop acting as if it is really producing value, convert itself into being a small umbrella trade organization for our federations and give up on trying to be something that it can no longer be.
It is time for reality check and serious zero based budgeting.
The Federation world sees our history through a mythological prism of continuity and unity; ignoring the cycles of change that have marked the five decades since the '73 war.
The 70's and 80's were the age of "campaign as the "lifeblood of Federation" and overseas needs as the "big Mac" on the menu. The 90's began with the golden age of community planning and the ascendancy of the Jewish identity agenda, a movement that coopted the Israel agenda through Israel experience programs. In the first two decades of this century, we saw the rise of endowments,the triumphalism of Foundations, the re-emergence of Jewish human services and the growth of a diverse array of micro start up initiatives at the grass roots. Yet through it all, like Neanderthals viewing the onslaught of Sapiens, JFNA and its succession of CEO's remained the clueless sirens of "we are one".
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