February 26, 2009 | Read Time: 3 minutes
Jewish charities created in the past 10 years are serving a diverse clientele, with more than a quarter of participants in the organizations having no other meaningful connection to Jewish causes, according to a survey of new Jewish organizations.
The survey, conducted in December, also suggests that the financial crisis is hurting the roughly 300 Jewish organizations that have been created in the past decade. Fifty-nine percent of the charity leaders who responded say they have already taken steps to cut costs, such as delaying new projects or freezing salaries.
The survey was sponsored by the Natan Fund, a giving circle in New York that supports emerging Jewish organizations, and the Samuel Bronfman Foundation, whose grants seek to inspire a renaissance of Jewish life.
Felicia Herman, executive director of the Natan Fund, says the goal of the survey was to collect some baseline data that might illustrate the impact these start-ups are having, as the groups enter a period when fund raising is likely to become increasingly challenging.
$500-Million
The survey, conducted by Jumpstart, which is itself a new charity based in Los Angeles that helps to incubate other new Jewish organizations, focused on organizations with budgets under $2-million that had been created since 1998. It found that donors had provided nearly $500-million to new Jewish organizations over time, including more than $100-million in 2008 alone.
Only 10 percent of the organizations have budgets exceeding $1-million per year, and 37 percent get by on budgets of $50,000 or less.
Thirty-nine percent of respondents described their programs as “religion-related.”
Other groups surveyed are involved in education (17 percent); arts, culture, or humanities (10 percent ); and civil rights, social action, or advocacy (6 percent).
Older Donors
The growth in the number of new Jewish organizations has not been universally hailed by all Jewish charities.
Shawn Landres, a co-author of the report, says there’s a perception among some older donors who tend to support traditional Jewish organizations that the new charities are “ephemeral” groups connecting only with those on the fringe of Jewish life.
But Mr. Landres, who is also a co-founder of Jumpstart, says the survey shows a broad mix of ages, participation levels, and interest in Jewish activities among participants in the charities. Leaders of the new charities estimated that 26 percent of their participants or clientele had no other meaningful connection to Jewish life, and that another 29 percent were only moderately involved in Jewish affairs or groups.
Yet very few of the new charities are explicitly focused on outreach — only 3 percent reported serving a population in which 90 percent of the participants were otherwise unconnected to Jewish causes.
And the charity leaders indicated that a solid minority of their participants — some 45 percent — were already deeply involved in Jewish causes. Those participants, Mr. Landres maintains, are not fully satisfied exploring their Jewish identity within traditional Jewish organizations.
“They are not finding the types of connections that they’re looking for,” he says. “They might be sending their kids to day schools and going to synagogues, but they are also forming their own grass-roots organizations where they are finding personal meaning.”
Financial Woes
To cope with declining financial support, more than half of the charities in the survey with paid employees indicated some willingness to share technology (68 percent) or administrative staff members (54 percent). But the leaders of the charities remained somewhat wary of mergers — 42 percent of respondents anticipated that a merger could have a somewhat or very negative impact on their organization’s health, while only 31 percent anticipated a somewhat or very positive impact.
Preliminary results of the “2008 Survey of New Jewish Organizations” were released last week. The full results will be released next month.
