Tag Archives: JCA Endowment

12 REASONS WHY MOST IF NOT ALL MEMBERS OF THE JEWISH COMMUNITY ASSOCIATION BOARD SHOULD GRACEFULLY RESIGN

20 Sunday Jul 2014

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Here’s a question for all members of the Board of Directors of the Jewish Community Association and a question for the broader Jewish community to reflect upon as you think about the abject failure of the JCA.  Mr. or Ms. JCA board member, are you a valuable, valued and responsible member of the JCA board?  If not, your immediate and graceful resignation may be good for you, the JCA and the Greater Phoenix Jewish Community.

12 REASONS WHY JCA BOARD MEMBERS SHOULD CONSIDER GRACEFULLY RESIGNING:

1.  You’re serving on the board more for personal benefit than for public benefit.

Do you or your business stand to gain financially because you are on the board?  For example, does your firm sell a product or service to the JCA such as health insurance?  Is the prestige you get from your board service helping to promote you in the community?  Was being a member of the board helpful for your wife to become the interim CFO?

2.  You have a material financial interest in a transaction with the organization that would be damaging if known by the public. 

See #1

3.  The organization’s values or activities are inconsistent with your personal values.

Do you believe in maximum transparency, high organizational effectiveness and efficiency, treating all employees with respect, demanding complete professionalism from the CEO, making maximum positive impact on the community, having an organizational brand that makes you feel proud and one that the majority of the community knows and admires?

4.  You are unable to support the organization when a board action is taken contrary to your vote.

Have you asked yourself why you continue to serve when the JCA board continues to bring shame to the organization because of errors of omission or commission?

5.  The organization is not operating consistent with the law and/or its own governing documents or policies despite your efforts to insist on compliance.

Have you ever read the bylaws of the organization that you serve?  Are you fully aware of the governmental laws and policies that govern the JCA?

6.  You’re not informed about the organization’s current activities and/or mission-oriented results, and you’re not informed about the performance of the organization’s executive.

Do you believe the JCA is well served by Stuart Wachs as its executive?  Have you provided direct feedback to Mr. Wachs about his performance or the way he is seen and talked about in the community?  Can you explain to supporters in specific terms what the JCA is accomplishing to improve the community – not in platitudes but in very specific terms? Do you believe that it is acceptable that 46% of the discretionary money raised by the JCA should be used for its overhead and undisclosed programs rather than being allocated to the Jewish agencies in the community?

7.  You don’t review the organization’s financials on a regular basis.

Do you have a good working knowledge of the JCA’s financial position?  Do you regularly review the profit and loss statement and the balance sheet?  Are those financial documents regularly reported on and discussed at the JCA’s board meetings?  Do you have significant questions or concerns but are afraid to raise them or ask them at the board meetings?

8.  You’re missing a significant number of board meetings and therefore unable to actively participate in governance-related planning, deliberations, and actions.

Do you regularly attend at least 80% of the board meetings and the meetings of the committees to which you are assigned? When you leave a JCA board meeting do you leave with a sense of pride and accomplishment knowing that your time was well spent and that it will make a positive difference in the community?

9.  You’re not contributing resources (money, time, connections, or other valuable assets) to the organization apart from the time to show up at meetings.

Are you making a significant annual financial contribution to the JCA?  When there is an additional appeal such as for Israel during a crisis do you make an additional financial contribution?  Are you actively soliciting support on behalf of the JCA’s annual campaign?  Do you regularly talk proudly to your friends about your association with the JCA as a member of its board?

10.  You don’t spend significant amounts of time thinking hard about whether the organization is effective at advancing its mission and how the organization could be more effective at advancing its mission.

Have you offered any input or suggestions about ways in which the JCA could be more effective in its fundraising, grantmaking, community planning, and reputation building?  And are you satisfied with all of these things? Do you wonder why there has been so much hiring, firing and resigning at the JCA staff?  Do you have any idea what current or past employees think about the organization and its leadership?

 11.  Your conduct at board meetings is viewed by the majority of other board members as disruptive, and you’re unable to work collaboratively with the other board members in a productive manner.

Are you a constructive board member at the JCA meetings either by refraining from disruptive comments or, perhaps even worse, by sitting quietly and not saying much if anything about the operations and condition of the JCA especially when you have something on your mind?  Do you wait until after the board meeting to vent your frustration in the parking lot or later with other board members who are also frustrated?

 12.  You intervene/interfere with the executive’s management of the organization by personally directing the executive and/or staff and falsely asserting rank (because a board member has no individual authority and no inherent rank in the organizational hierarchy as an individual).

 Do you do this? Or, to the contrary, do you avoid offering constructive ideas and input to the CEO or to the Chairman of the Board about their performance, the board’s performance and the overall performance of the JCA?

If your honest answers to most of these questions runs counter to these 12 questions then you should seriously consider gracefully stepping down from the JCA board.  Because the JCA is in VERY serious condition and as a board member the ultimate responsibility rests with you.  Not with Stuart Wachs.  Not with Joel Kramer.  But with each of the elected members of the board individually and collectively.  The buck (and the lack of bucks) stops with you.  If you are not part of the solution then you are part of the problem and thus you must consider gracefully exiting the board.

If you’re unable to meet your fiduciary duties of care and loyalty to act with reasonable care in good faith in the best interests of the JCA, you’re failing to meet your legal responsibilities. While personal liability may be extremely rare for volunteer directors of nonprofits (absent some kind of intentional wrongdoing, fraud, self-dealing, or unpaid taxes), you’re also putting yourself at greater risk, including from claims that may not be protected by your JCA’s Directors and Officers liability insurance. Further, your failure to meet your duties may be holding back the JCA from better advancing its charitable mission and serving its intended beneficiaries.

If you’re able to meet your fiduciary duties but the majority of the board is not, and such deficiency results in an organization with serious compliance issues and values that don’t align with yours, you may also be putting yourself at greater risk. In such case, you may need to balance your duty to still meet your individual legal duties with your obligation to do what’s best for the organization and your interest in protecting your personal interests from possible legal and/or reputational harm.

(This Blog post is based on an article written by Gene Takagi, a California nonprofit attorney who has provided corporate, tax, and governance counsel to hundreds of nonprofit clients. He has successfully helped strengthen nonprofits and social enterprises with responsive and comprehensible guidance in areas including: formation, tax-exempt status, governance, legal compliance, document review, collaborations, mergers, earned income, advocacy, international activities, and dissolution.)

 

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THE JCA’S REPORT CARD – FULL OF EMBARRASSINGLY FAILED GRADES

25 Sunday May 2014

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A Gallup poll study is hardly necessary to conclude that the performance of the Jewish Community Association (JCA) and the local Jewish Federation before it has made the Greater Phoenix Jewish Community one of the most underperforming Jewish communities in the nation. Even without hard data it would be difficult to find any knowledgeable and engaged Jew in the area who would contradict the premise that the JCA’s fundraising ability as reflected in its annual Campaign for Jewish Needs is embarrassingly meager. And as a result of such shameful results the JCA’s financial support of critically important and unmet community needs has been nothing short of pauperous and misery.

But despite what most knowledgeable people have intuited to be a failed fundraising machine for decades it should not be left to conjecture and assumption to indict the lay and professional leaders of the JCA for their shameful performance as fundraisers. That indictment deserves to be supported by facts and analysis by an irrefutable source… data that the local JCA itself has provided to an authoritative national study published by the North American Jewish Data Bank in cooperation with the JCA’s own umbrella organization, the Jewish Federations of North America.

A November 2013 study Comparisons of Jewish Communities – A Compendium of Tables and Bar Charts was prepared by the very distinguished Dr. Ira Sheskin, Director of the Jewish Demography Project at the University of Miami. The study contains comparative data on virtually every aspect of American Jewish demographics and behaviors in a 36 chapter report. But the one chapter that analyzes the relative fundraising performance of Federation study participants is found in Section 29 Donations to Jewish Federations. And the data is both revealing and chilling regarding the Greater Phoenix Jewish community. Data that the JCA has understandably been eager to keep out of public view. And data that JCA leaders are constantly trying to dodge and excuse as not relevant. When it comes to this data and its implications the JCA has done more spinning of this data than a school full of children with Hanukah dreidels.

According to the introduction of the report: “The compendium is a single source of tables and bar charts designed to provide a comparative context for understanding American Jewish communities. It is intended for local Jewish communities seeking to compare themselves to others as well as for researchers, teachers and students of North American Jewry. In short, it is an invaluable tool that is based on self-reported data by local Federations.”­­

The entire 67-page Section 29 Donations to Jewish Federations can be found online at: https://tinyurl.com/nbp6j77 . Here are just a few highlights, or perhaps it is better to describe them as lowlights from this important benchmark study.

  • Phoenix ranks 48 out of 54 participating communities when measuring the number of households who donated to the local Jewish Federation in the last reporting year. Phoenix reports that only 25% of Jewish households donated to the JCA while eight cities report that between 50% to 61% of their households donated.
  • 71% of Jewish households in the Phoenix area do not contribute to ANY Jewish Federation which explodes the myth that many Phoenix Jews give to Federations in cities where they have a second home or where they emigrated from. Of the 34 communities reporting in this area only two cities (Las Vegas and Seattle) had a worse performance.
  • Of 44 communities reporting the number of Jewish households which do not support ANY Jewish charity, Phoenix reports that 49% of its community falls into the group that do not support any Jewish charity. Only four communities report a worse percentage of support for Jewish charities.
  • Perhaps one of the most shameful statistics is the average gift per total Jewish households in a community to its local Federation campaign. Phoenix ranked 50 out of 53 reporting cities with the average gift per household at an appalling $65. The ten Federations with the largest average household gift to their campaign are: Detroit $968; Tidewater (VA) $778; Charlotte $753; Minneapolis $731; Cleveland $716; Baltimore $617; Pittsburgh $613; Milwaukee $599; Richmond $582; Columbus $561. Tucson reports an average gift per Jewish household of $254.
  • A related piece of data shows the number of households and the total size of the Federation campaign in each community. In this chart Phoenix reports 44,000 households and a campaign total of $2,863,000. The cities with the closest number of households and their campaign totals are: Denver 47,500 households and $6,040,000; San Diego 46,000 households and $6,135,000; Essex-Morris (NJ) 44,500 households and $19,684,000; Baltimore 42,500 households and $26,241,000; Cleveland 38,300 households and $27,411,000; Detroit 30,000 households and $29,051,000; Miami 54,000 households and $21,695,000.
  • Communities with a much smaller number of Jewish households but with relatively remarkable robust annual Federation campaign totals include: Tidewater (VA) 5,400 households and $4,202,000; Charlotte 4,000 households and $3,013,00; Minneapolis 13,850 households and $10,131,000; Pittsburgh 20,900 households and $12,805,000; Milwaukee $10,400 households and $$6,232,000; Richmond 5,000 households and $$2,946,000; Columbus 11,878 households and $$6,658,000; Lehigh Valley (PA) 4,000 households and $2,176,000; St. Paul 4,700 households and $2,278,000; San Antonio 4,500 households and $1,883,000; Cincinnati 12,500 households and $5,111,000; Rochester 10,230 and $4,133,000; St. Louis 24,600 and $9,288,000; Jacksonville 6,700 and $2,327,000; Hartford 14,800 households and $4,684,000; New Haven 11,000 and $2,906,000; Seattle 22,490 households and $4,907,000 and Tucson 13,400 households and $3,400,000.
  • One of the charts in which Phoenix is notably absent measures “Familiarity with the Local Federation”. 37 communities responded with a range of 20% to 60% of local Jewish households reporting that they are not at all aware of the Federation. The fact that Phoenix didn’t report indicates that the local JCA is completely out of touch with what the broader Jewish population in the Valley thinks about the JCA or if they even know it exists.
  • And the last piece of data that speaks volumes about the disastrous market condition of the local JCA is the chart that measures the “Perception of the Local Federation”. In this chart, 34 communities report a range of 93% to 68% of local households that regard their perception of the Federation as Excellent or Good. And once again, the Phoenix JCA did not report leaving one to conclude that they are clueless as to the qualitative perceptions of their local community about their organization.

There is considerably more data available in this study but in no case does Phoenix ever report statistics that are exemplary or commendable. And there are at least 100 other Federation communities which did not even participate in the analysis so it is difficult to say how Phoenix would compare if the report was complete and comprehensive.

What can be concluded from this is that the JCA, and the Federation before it, have been woefully underperforming organizations in the past, they continue to show their inability to motivate and engage the community today and it is highly unlikely that they will be able to engender sufficient trust and confidence to lead Phoenix to become a high performing Jewish community in the future. The only thing that might change the JCA’s failing trajectory is to eliminate it completely, let the dust settle, and convene as a community to take stock in what the best way forward might be to create a vibrant and thriving Jewish community.

You have to work out which ditch you are prepared to die in.

02 Thursday Feb 2012

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I attended the “70th Annual Meeting of the Jewish Federation of Greater Phoenix and the Inaugural Meeting of the Jewish Community Association of Greater Phoenix.” I am 48 years old and I would say that I was on the younger side of those attending. Well dressed Jews, listening to speech after speech from well meaning volunteers and donors, either discussing how important the Federation has been in their life, or how important the Campus is to the sustenance of the Jewish Community. I could not help think that the scene was probably akin to the atmosphere in the lounge of the Titanic as that vessel cleared the English Channel. Well heeled people, listening to their friends being congratulated, smug in their place and position as leaders, people of substance. Lot’s of inside jokes about this or that board member, introducing one another as neighbors, and not a person under 30 in the room to appreciate this wonderful evening.

There is an old joke about the two greatest lies ever told. The first lie is: “the check is in the mail”, and the second lie should be, “the Levine Campus is the Center of Jewish Universe of the Phoenix Metropolitan Area.” Joel Kramer’s discussion of the JCA’s new $12,000,000 Endowment scheme, of which he is the Chairman, euphemistically entitled “Fulfilling the Promise”, was as riveting as watching a three card monty game, and mercifully, just as short. But Joel, like all people in charge of perpetrating a confidence game, came through with just a few morsels of information so that those in attendance and beyond could contemplate their next opportunity to stoke the Titanic’s boilers, basking in the glow of admiration from their fellow lemmings.

Joel asserted with confidence that the Campus was the greatest achievement of the Jewish Federation of Phoenix, and that the new “Fulfilling the Promise” Ponzi Scheme/Endowment would be the greatest achievement of the Jewish Community Association. And then he dropped the bomb: 25,000 people visit the Campus every month. There are about 83,000 Jews in Phoenix, and at first blush that seems like a pretty huge number, and would appear, if you had a very solid third grade education, that more than 30% of the Jewish population is visiting the Campus. But, since I am a very proud graduate of high school, which were the best eight years of my life, I think that we are really not talking about unique visitors, and I am going to say that with membership hovering in the neighborhood of 3,000 members, that this number represents about 833 people per day. Since health club members, day school attendees, and others who use the Campus are pretty habitual users, I am going to basically give the JCA the benefit of the doubt and agree that there are 1,600 people who use that facility each month, and that accounts for the total number of visitors to the facility. I am probably being very generous here. However, given my generosity, even if we doubled that to 3,200 unique habitual visitors to the facility each month, and that they come to the facility month after month, we are still only talking about 3,200/83,0000 people. I would be surprised if more than 3.8% of the Jewish population makes use of the Campus.

So, if 25,000 aggregate visits from 3,200 different people make that facility the center of the Phoenix Jewish Universe, then I am going to guess that Chompie’s delicatessen plays an even more important role in Phoenix’s Jewish community. This is because between their three locations, they must be getting more than 700 Jews a day through their doors. I also believe there is a higher possibility that they are unique visitors, because if you ate deli every day, you’d be dead.

When I began attending boarding school, I was 11 years old and someone at the school had the bright idea of housing the middle school boarders in the dorm that housed the Seniors, thinking the seniors would be more mature, more compassionate, and would haze us less. There was actually a Senior named Adolph who lived in my dorm, and no shock there, he was a pretty big Jew hater. He took a special delight in kicking my ass every day of the week, and he hazed me like crazy. But the thing about Adolf was that I could always see him coming. I mean, for the love of Christ, if you name your kid Adolf and he is American, you are most likely going to have an affinity for snappy brown uniforms, red armbands, shattering the windows of store fronts, and passing these passions on to your kids. But in those lonely moments of getting my ass kicked, I never once shied away or was ashamed of identifying myself with being Jewish. Now that I live in Phoenix, and knowing how we are behaving towards the most vulnerable amongst us, taking money from their support to support the Campus, I think I am more comfortable hiding my Jewish identity here, because I could not bear being considered as a member of this group.

At least the Jewish News had the strength to highlight this in their latest issue. When you give money to the JCA to support the Campus, ask yourself if this this the ditch you are prepared to die in? Are you the type of person who thinks that a building that is used by less than 4% of the population, designed to glorify the contributions of the few, is the greatest achievement of the Jewish Federation? Is it a great achievement to reduce funding to the needy and skip out on our financial commitment to Israel to support a building that few of us actually use? Can being a good Jew or even a great Jew be defined by building and owning a cool athletic facility? If that is the case, I am guessing that the list of the greatest Jews the world has ever known could be amended and might look like this: Abraham, Moses, Maimonides, Jones (Jerry), and Hofheinz (Roy).

THE JCA’S NEW ENDOWMENT FUND – “FULFILLING THE PROMISE” TO WASTE THE REST OF THE COMMUNITY’S MONEY

28 Saturday Jan 2012

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There are two precepts that I tend to place above all others when it comes to businesses.  The first precept is that it is impossible to fix stupid.  Nothing can be done to remedy the management of an enterprise, if the management is made up of stupid people.  It will not be possible to make them smart.  The management must be changed.  The second precept is that if a company is managed by dishonest people, the investors will lose more money than if the management was just merely stupid.  Another way to say this is that you can rarely lose more money through a stupid decision than someone can steal from you.

The new endowment fund that was launched by our JCA might represent the rare opportunity to lose twelve million dollars through a combination of management dishonesty and stupidity.  It is really a Ponzi-like scheme, taking fresh money to cover the future losses while calling it an “endowment”, which generally connotes sustainability and perpetuity.  Therefore, I am going to call this new scheme a “Ponzdowment”.  I might be so isolated as to never have heard of an endowment campaign that has the veiled purpose of covering the operating operating expenses of a failing enterprise, but I doubt it.  Every endowment campaign I have ever reviewed, donated to, or had the pleasure of serving on has had the stated purpose of providing perpetual funding to a particular organization.  I have never actually heard of, or seen an endowment campaign that was designed to spend all the money raised in twelve years, leaving the institution being supported in the same terrible financial shape it was in at the inception of the campaign.  Endowment funds are generally used to help an organization become sustainable.  This Ponzdowment represents a case of “doubling down” that would leave even the most cynical gamblers scratching their heads.

“Fulfilling the Promise” is just a sliver of wordplay symptomatic of continued JCA mismanagement and their inability to be honest with the Jewish community of Phoenix. Instead of the JCA’s board saying to the community: “hey, we f_cked up and squandered $34,000,000.00 of donated money by creating a campus that will never be able to be operated without loss, we are sorry for having done so and we will resign, en-masse”, we are presented with the JCA’s Board directed Solipsism and detachment from reality: a ponzi scheme dressed up by calling it an endowment campaign, euphemistically entitled, “Fulfilling the Promise.”

It is very clear that the promise the JCA’s board is fulfilling is to squander whatever money they missed the first time around, like the Grinch making one more sweep and grabbing that one toy he missed and stuffing it in his bag.  I think that the campaign should be entitled truthfully and named: The Ponzdowment Campaign to Cover Up Our Mistakes to Help Fund A Failing Health Club For Twelve More Years.  With a tag line below it, “Because we think you’re all stupid.”

As to the oft repeated idiocy quoted by the JCA’s wise men of Chelm that: “The success of the campus is imperative to the survival of a strong, cohesive Jewish community in Metro Phoenix”, I have noticed that in the two years that have passed since I have been on that campus, I am still Jewish, I still belong to a synagogue, and my foreskin is still missing.  Maybe it has to be that the building can no longer be standing for the Jewish community of Phoenix to undergo this decimation.  Or maybe the campus is actually The Third Temple and if we don’t support it, that’s OK, just do not expect to be hanging with Moshiach anytime soon.

So, if you, like me, are curious about the management freak show at the JCA, spend the $18.00 and attend the annual meeting at 7:00 PM on Wednesday, Feb. 1 – it could be even more weird than Coney Island’s.