Day school benefactors Jerry and Paula Gottesman; she said she wondered why alumni — and their parents and grandparents — weren’t being appealed to for school funds.
Advertisement
June 11, 2009
Borrowing a time-honored technique from the world of secular private schools and colleges, the MetroWest Jewish Community Foundation will turn to alumni of the three Jewish day schools in the MetroWest area for contributions.
Armed with a six-figure grant from the AVI CHAI Foundation, the JCF and The Partnership for Jewish Learning and Life of MetroWest are creating a new position: coordinator of day school alumni affairs. The grant was announced June 2.
The coordinator will be charged with asking graduates of the three schools — Solomon Schechter Day School of Essex and Union in West Orange, Rae Kushner Yeshiva High School in Livingston, and Nathan Bohrer-Abraham Kaufman Hebrew Academy of Morris County in Randolph — for support of their alma maters.
“All three schools are excited and very supportive of this effort,” said Kim Hirsh, development officer at the JCF and coordinator of its Day School Campaign.
The Partnership and the JCF applied jointly for the grant from AVI CHAI, a New York-based private foundation that funds innovations in Jewish education, among other things.
Out of 53 applicants, the MetroWest proposal was one of six in the United States to receive a grant that Hirsh said is “somewhere in the neighborhood” of $100,000 for each of two years.
Under foundation rules, the amount of the grant cannot be divulged, but Hirsh said it “will enable MetroWest to establish what is believed to be the first collaborative day school office of alumni relations in the nation.”
AVI CHAI is giving out some $540,000 over the next two years to the six recipients to foster cooperation and cost-saving.
“We view these six initiatives as experiments designed to yield greater economies of scale that will lower costs,” said Yossi Prager, AVI CHAI’s executive director in North America, in a statement. “We anticipate a double benefit: first, immediate success for the benefit of the participating schools and communities and second, lessons that we hope will ultimately reduce the cost of day school education in other communities as well.”
Kim Hirsh, development officer at the MetroWest Jewish Community Foundation and coordinator of its Day School Campaign, called the combined alumni outreach something “nobody in the country has ever done before.”
The MetroWest proposal struck out in a slightly different direction by “tapping the generosity of day school alumni for increased gifts,” Hirsch explained.
“This is an unfamiliar area for many day schools in America,” she said.
‘Good investment’
Together with her husband Jerry, Paula Gottesman is a key benefactor of the MetroWest foundation’s day school campaign, a collaborative effort to control costs and maintain high-quality academics at the three local schools.
She called alumni recruitment a no-brainer.
“I kept asking, ‘Why aren’t we going after alumni and their parents and even their grandparents?’” she said.
Gottesman, who lives in Morristown, said local schools need assistance in strategizing their outreach to alumni.
“Their fundraising has not been very aggressive,” she said. “They’ve been going after the same people and leaving gaping holes.”
Once hired, the day school alumni coordinator could begin work as early as July 1 at the Whippany office of The Partnership.
The coordinator is tasked with achieving a 10 percent increase in alumni contributions during the next three years.
Robert Lichtman, executive director of the Partnership, believes the three schools’ prior collaborations will minimize rivalries among them for the extra dollars they are all seeking.
“AVI CHAI saw there is already a track record of collaboration here, and that makes their grant a pretty good investment,” he said. “Hopefully we will be taking advantage of what already exists in a lot of private schools around the country, a growing and sustainable stream of income. Day schools up to now have been relying on tuition money and fund-raising and federation allocations. Those three will not go away.
“But add to them a fourth, contributions from alumni,” said Lichtman, “and hopefully we will improve the quality of Jewish education.”
Comment: comments@njjewishnews.com
--TOP--
