from strength to strength: jufj strategic plan

FROM STRENGTH

TO STRENGTH

Strategic Plan

2013-2015

JUFJ Strategic Plan 2013-2015 | page 1 of 14

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Jews United for Justice leads Washington area Jews to act on our shared values to pursue justice and

equality in our local community. JUFJ has grown dramatically in the last five years, more than

quadrupling our staff size, budget and activist base, with a corresponding increase in impact. We’ve

developed from a scrappy little organization to a more established player in the local political world

and the Jewish community, with a strong reputation and a track record of winning campaigns. This plan

lays out a vision for JUFJ as we take another big step forward over the next three years to strengthen

our ability to make an impact in DC and Montgomery County, and build the capacity to make change in

Baltimore and Northern Virginia.

Three years from now, JUFJ will be able to play a key role in winning big campaigns in DC,

Montgomery County, Baltimore, and at the state level in Maryland, and will be taking on our first

campaign in Northern Virginia (likely in Arlington or Alexandria). A new sister 501c4 organization will

be organizing thousands of voters in DC to advance our issues by supporting progressive candidates

for office. We will have a larger, more diverse, and tighter woven community of members, a wider and

even more skilled network of leaders, and strong relationships with clergy and congregations across

the region. Holding it all together will be a more established and professional organization, nimble

enough to respond to obstacles as we come upon them but still deeply connected to our grassroots

leaders.

In 2013, we will focus on consolidating our growth and establishing a 501c4 organization to engage in

election activities that advance our mission.

If dedicated funds can be raised from new sources, we establish a base in Baltimore in 2014.

By 2015, we will expand our base and launch our first campaign in Northern Virginia.

WHY WE DO THIS WORK

Justice is a Jewish value. Tradition calls on us to protect the vulnerable, fight exploitation, and treat all

people with dignity. Our history is the story of rising from oppression to freedom and from marginality

to affluence. Our past reminds us to ensure that other communities have the rights and opportunities

we enjoy. Many Jews share dreams for a more just world, and deep commitment to do something

substantive and lasting towards those dreams, yet lack the connections and knowledge necessary to act

effectively. Jews United for Justice helps area Jews “think Jewishly and act locally” by connecting Jewish

identity and community to action on local grassroots campaigns for equality and justice.

JUFJ educates and mobilizes everyday Jews to take action on the economic and political struggles facing

our region. In a city and region divided by stark inequalities, we reach across class and racial divides to

partner with organizations led by and representing low income and marginalized people.


WHERE WE ARE

JUFJ has grown dramatically in the last five years, more than quadrupling our staff size, budget and

activist base, with a corresponding increase in impact. We’ve developed from a scrappy little

organization, to a more established player in the local political world and the Jewish community, with a

strong reputation and a track record of winning campaigns. We’ve accomplished that growth by hiring

fantastic staff, finding and supporting committed and dynamic volunteer leaders, and picking (mostly)

the right campaigns.

Now that we’ve proven we can make a critical impact in campaigns, the pressure is on to make sure

we use that power effectively and don’t squander what we’ve built. There aren’t a lot of other groups

out there who can pick up the slack if we don’t deliver.

RECENT GROWTH

2007 2010 2012

Staff 1 FT 3 FT, 1 PT, 1 Intern 6 FT, 1 PT, 3 Interns

Programs 1 Campaign 1 Campaign

Jeremiah Fellowship

2 Campaigns

Jeremiah Fellowship

Ruth Fellowship

Total Event

Attendance

252 520 1168

Donors 254 783 864

Budget $75,000 $260,000 $350,000

In recent years JUFJ has had a series of major accomplishments and moments where we’ve raised the

bar – establishing ourselves as a powerful and professional organization without losing our grassroots

foundation.

RECENT ACCOMPLISHMENTS

Restoring $25 million for key safety net services through progressive tax measures. In 2011, JUFJ’s

Invest in DC Campaign mobilized nearly a thousand DC voters over six months to fund key safety

net services by making the DC tax system more progressive. The community pressure we created

led Councilmember Mary Cheh to introduce the budget amendment and provide the decisive 7th

vote to create a new tax bracket for individuals earning more than $350,000 a year, which raises

more than $25 million a year for key services.

Educating and mobilizing 20,000 Marylanders to vote for Marriage Equality and the Dream Act.

JUFJ’s Dream for Equality Campaign engaged more than a dozen area synagogues and hundreds of

volunteers in a six-month effort to make history and win these issues through ballot measure.

The Jeremiah Fellowship has now graduated nearly 50 high capacity change makers who have gone

on to leading roles in JUFJ campaigns & programs, taking on leadership in partner organizations, and

even running for DC Council.


MAJOR PRIORITIES FOR THE NEXT THREE YEARS

1. Build on our strengths and consolidate our growth

2. Establish the capacity to engage in electoral activities in DC

3. Make our claim of regional work true by establishing a real presence in Northern Virginia

4. Carefully establish a base in Baltimore

1. BUILD ON OUR STRENGTHS AND CONSOLIDATE OUR GROWTH

In recent years JUFJ has had a series of major accomplishments and moments where we’ve raised

the bar – establishing ourselves as a powerful and professional organization without losing our

grassroots flavor. At the same time as we’ve succeeded, we have faced new and daunting

challenges. With growth comes growing pains, and there is much work to do to build on our

strengths and fill the holes that have emerged. We plan to take advantage of our new affiliation

with Bend the Arc and Jewish Community Action to learn best practices from our closest peers in

the Jewish community.

Systems: We have grown through experimentation, both out of creative inspiration and necessity.

This process has had many positive outcomes. But one consequence is that we have relatively few

systems in place for how our staff and members collaborate to do the work, and it often feels like

we’re constantly reinventing our work process. By creating stronger systems to routinize some

aspects of our work, we could spend less time thinking and more time acting. Some areas that need

attention include:

A. A formal Leadership Ladder to identify, track, and match leaders with opportunities

B. Leadership Training for leaders beyond our Fellowship programs

C. Better taking advantage of our database and other technology to support our work

Innovating: Even as we systematize as much as possible, we also will need to stay open to new

experimentation in the coming years. Work in suburban areas will be different from our past work

in DC. We should both be open to trying new ideas in these areas and cross-pollinating what

works between our urban and suburban organizing. Since we don’t yet know what these ideas will

be, some may require additional resources beyond those projected in the attached draft budget.

Community Building: We need to find the right balance between relationship/community building

and campaigning. Our younger leaders say that they make time for JUFJ because of the relationships

they have with other leaders and the feeling that they’ve found meaningful Jewish community. For

the first decade of JUFJ’s existence, the strong personal networks between activist members was

enough to hold the community together and move many people to action. Now that we are larger,

with more staff and leaders, it’s harder for any one person to know a significant fraction of our

base. We need to invest more in community building to help our members seeking community find


a real home in JUFJ and make the jump to taking action with us. We must help our members find

connections in a way that creates the relationships which are so critical to sustained activism and

campaign leadership.

2. ESTABLISH THE CAPACITY TO ENGAGE IN ELECTORAL ACTIVITIES IN DC

Over the past decade, JUFJ has used non-partisan community organizing as our primary strategy for

making legislative change on the issues we care about. We’ve been able to accomplish a lot using

this tool, but there are limits to what we can win through non-partisan organizing alone.

By creating a sister 501c4 organization that can lobby more extensively, and with the capacity to

endorse candidates, we would have a new and powerful tool to advance the social justice

campaigns that are the core of JUFJ’s work. It would enable us to more powerfully hold elected

leaders accountable for their promises, support candidates who would be strong progressive

voices, build our base by engaging volunteers in election oriented work, and engage more of the

progressive Jewish community in DC by giving them something easy to do that they were probably

already going to do anyhow - vote.

JUFJ is well positioned to make an impact on DC elections because there are more than 20,000

voting aged Jews living in DC, the vast majority of whom are progressive. These voters generally

don’t feel well informed about local elections and are looking for information to help them choose

a candidate who embodies their values. We will combine old fashioned community organizing with

the advanced targeted tools that have become so important to political campaigns in recent years

to build a network of thousands of Jewish voters. We can advance our issues by carefully endorsing

candidates, encouraging our members to volunteer for candidates we’ve endorsed, and engaging in

targeted Get Out The Vote activities. By building a block of progressive Jewish voters we can make

a significant impact in the low-turnout primary elections that determine the DC Council’s makeup.

We will focus our electoral work in the District because we have a longer track record of work in

the city, with a strong base of active members, and good understanding of the political terrain.

Furthermore, there are very few other c4 or political organization active in DC, which means we

can have a large impact for relatively low cost, starting with a $10,000 - $20,000 budget for

electoral activities. We will not hire new or dedicated staff for this initiative. Rather, JUFJ and the

new 501c4 would share staff. The c4 would pay for any time spent doing c4 activities, so in some

months there might not be any expenses while in another month two staff members might spend

50% of their time on electoral work that the c4 would pay for.

As we launch this new sister organization, we will need to create a clear process and criteria for

making endorsement decisions. There is always a risk that by endorsing one candidate (or choosing

not to endorse anyone) we may disappoint or anger our supporters, or damage our relationship


with other candidates. When people agree that the criteria and process are fair, members who

might disagree with a decision will be much more likely to accept it. We will also need to

differentiate the identity of this new organization so that it will not impact our ability to work with

synagogues and other partners.

3. CAREFULLY ESTABLISH A BASE IN BALTIMORE

As we’ve explored the next campaign for our base in suburban Maryland, we’ve found that unlike in

District, where local government - the DC Council - has the power to make almost any legislative

decision, many of the most important social and economic justice issues in Maryland can only be

addressed through statewide legislation. To effect statewide legislation, we need to be able to

influence legislators beyond Montgomery County, especially as the County’s legislators are rarely

swing votes. By contrast, the Baltimore Jewish community is geographically concentrated in a

handful of districts that include some key swing votes.

With a base in Baltimore, we’d be able to make statewide impact in Annapolis, and we would speak

to the hopes of many Baltimore-area Jews for more organized progressive Jewish community. Any

Baltimore presence needs to be led by Baltimoreans. To help us accomplish this, the Baltimore

chapter of the American Jewish Congress has approached JUFJ to ask if they could merge with us

to create the foundation for our operations in Baltimore.

Baltimore also represents a significant challenge because it is so different from the DC-area Jewish

community, requiring JUFJ to adapt its community organizing methods in a way that will fit

Baltimore’s unique circumstances. In contrast to the DC-area Jewish community, Baltimore’s is:

Different demographically, with a smaller core of the progressive 20- and 30-somethings who

have supplied so much energy to JUFJ in DC.

Different politically: While Baltimore does attract young Jews from around the country to

attend Hopkins, Goucher, Towson, and UMBC, that cohort doesn’t match the geographic

density and progressive political energy of the thousands of young liberal Jews who flock to DC

to work in the national progressive political infrastructure.

More cautious of outsiders (as one leader put it: “you’re not a Baltimore Jew unless your

parents were born in Baltimore”).

More Orthodox, with the latest data finding that one-third of the nearly 100,000 Baltimore area

Jews are Orthodox.

More Federation-centric, as The Associated is one of the most successful in the country at

raising funds centrally for communal organizations.

The leaders of the Baltimore American Jewish Congress strongly suggested that a successful

Baltimore Jewish community organizing strategy will need to balance engaging synagogues with

organizing young social justice activists. This would build off the solid core of social-justice-minded


rabbinic leaders and congregations that were identified through the Baltimore Green & Just

Celebrations Guide, which American Jewish Congress published in 2012 in partnership with JUFJ, a

dozen congregations, and The Associated.

American Jewish Congress’ leadership also believes that the Baltimore Jewish community would be

easiest to organize for campaigns on statewide issues – rather than city or county issues. The issues

that are clearest cut and easiest to mobilize around, such as paid sick leave, minimum wage, etc.,

where the Baltimore Jewish community can make a significant difference, all need to be fought for

and won at the state level.

To expand to Baltimore would require significant funding from new sources. We have identified a

handful of Baltimore-based Jewish foundations that are serious prospects to seed a Baltimore office.

If we are able to raise the funds, we would start by hiring a Baltimore Director to build a local

leadership council, recruit and launch a fellowship to train leaders, and identify a first campaign.

4. MAKE OUR CLAIM OF REGIONAL WORK TRUE BY ESTABLISHING A REAL PRESENCE IN

NORTHERN VIRGINIA

In Northern Virginia, JUFJ has a history of small projects and a handful of leaders, and we’ve always

thought of it as part of our area of work, but we’ve never invested significant organizational

resources to build a base for local campaigns. We know that there is much work to be done in

Virginia where the political environment is significantly more conservative than in DC or MD.

There are two very different Northern Virginias. Significant portions of Alexandria and Arlington

resemble downtown DC, with many idealistic young adults who moved to the region to work for

government or non-profits. This potential base is demographically similar to JUFJ’s most active base

of young adult Jews in DC – with many people seeking relationships, local grounding, and Jewish

community. The second Northern Virginia includes the suburbs outside the Beltway: Tysons

Corner, Vienna, Springfield, Reston, etc. There, the Jewish community is made up of more families,

and is more diffuse, and less socially connected than that of DC or Montgomery County.

We will begin our work in Northern Virginia by focusing on Arlington and/or Alexandria, where

we already have leaders and the work would require fewer resources. We already have a handful

of leaders who are committed to building our base and creating a sense of community among these

volunteers. As we build a critical mass of members (likely focusing on young adults) we will also

connect with new organizational allies and partners to identify an initial campaign.

This would give us a foothold in the region, and a base to expand from later (probably after 2015)

into suburban areas, where identifying and establishing relationships with leaders at a far flung set of

congregations will require significantly more time and resources.


INVESTMENTS NEEDED TO REACH OUR POTENTIAL

To maximize the impact of our current work and give ourselves the best chance of success in our new

initiatives, we will need to make some investments in the coming years.

INFRASTRUCTURE NECESSARY FOR SUSTAINED REGIONAL IMPACT

If we’re going to have a consistent region-wide impact, we need to establish a base of members who

can be reliably mobilized on a variety of issues. We’ve done just that in DC, but are still in the

formative stages of establishing this in suburban Maryland. Despite our success and growth, JUFJ is still

a small organization, operating on whatever is just a step up from a shoe-string budget. We finally have

the capacity to operate in multiple jurisdictions, but to take the next step to be a real powerhouse we

need to invest in JUFJ’s infrastructure:

Administrative support: JUFJ has an office culture where everyone rolls up their sleeves and gets

the work done. So far, that has worked well. But without consistent administrative capacity, we’re

starting to fall short. We’re not able to take full advantage of our data to identify new volunteers or

donors. Senior staff spends hours each week managing administrative issues, such as payroll,

reimbursements, mailings, vendors, etc. When we moved last fall, we spent many hours

coordinating the move and making sure the new space was up and running instead of raising money

for the Heschel Awards. Our next hire should be an Operations Manager or similar position that

will enable all our existing staff to accomplish more.

Increased investment in communications: We’ve directed our limited resources for

communications (primarily staff time) to communicating with our existing membership. But to grow

to scale we need more capacity to reach a wider audience and to identify new supporters through

traditional & social media. In the coming years we need to increase our investment in

communications capacity (either though staff or consultants) to enable us to gain greater coverage

in local media and to pursue innovative social media opportunities.

RETAINING JUFJ’S GREAT STAFF AND ATTRACTING FUTURE SUPERSTARS

Staff is JUFJ’s number one investment. As we’ve grown, we’ve had to navigate complicated political

landscapes and build relationships with more partners and elected leaders. That requires a stable staff

that can build and maintain relationships with our highly skilled volunteer leaders. Recruiting and

retaining a fantastic staff has been critical to our success in recent years, and will continue to be.

To give us the best chance of retaining the great staff we have, and adding superstar staff members in

the future, we will need to continue to make working for JUFJ attractive. No one goes into this work

to get rich, but we need to make it possible for people to imagine themselves here for the long haul.

We’ve made strides in that sense: reasonable workload (especially for organizing), flexible work

environment, steady salary growth, and a recently implemented retirement plan. This needs to be a

continued priority for JUFJ in coming years.


PLANNED SEQUENCING FOR STRATEGIC PLAN

This document lays out an aggressive plan for expanding JUFJ’s ability to impact in our region. We will need to proceed carefully to ensure

we don’t overextend ourselves. This chart lays out how we will sequence the key activities for each priority of the plan.

Year Consolidation 501c4 Baltimore Northern Virginia

2013 Reallocate staff time to

supporting additional

relational/community

building activities

Prioritize the list of systems

and internal improvements we need to make and begin

working on them

Recruit a board

Develop process & criteria

for endorsement

Create the legal structure

Establish administrative

processes for c3/c4

Build list of supporters that will be helpful in 2014

Start raising money

Jacob spends a few days in

Baltimore meeting with rabbis

and other key leaders

In fall submit funding proposal

to key foundations

Planning process to lay

groundwork for

Northern Virginia work

2014 Hire Operations Manager

Continue to work through our priority list of

improvements, with the

help of additional part time

or consultant help

Winter & Spring: mobilize

around April primary

election

Evaluate & assess

If receive funding:

Hire a Baltimore Director

Spring/Summer: Build a local council/board, meet key

partners, identify an initial

issue campaign, recruit for a

Ruth or Jeremiah Fellowship

Fall: Launch the new region

with an issue campaign and a

training program

Staff supported

community building

work begins

Identify 3-5 partners to build relationships with

for potential campaign

work

2015 Add additional

communications capacity

Base build, prep for 2016 If receive funding:

Run issue campaign (probably

at state level)

Graduate Ruth or Jeremiah Fellows & support their

organizing

Pick second campaign

Hire part time organizer

Choose and launch a campaign


PROJECTED BUDGET & FINANCIAL PROFILE

2013 20141 20152 2016

Income

Individual 225,000 300,000 397,000 450,000

Grants 155,000 285,000 300,000 290,000

Synagogues & Allies 20,000 23,000 25,000 30,000

Other 15,000 2,000 2,000 2,000

Expenses

Employee 325,000 470,000 571,250 605,000

Rent 25,500 30,000 34,000 35,000

Office 20,000 30,000 27,000 30,000

Program 21,000 30,000 32,000 35,000

Fundraising 10,000 12,000 15,000 16,000

Travel 4,000 6,000 6,500 7,000

Overhead 9,500 12,000 13,000 14,000

Operating Reserve 20,000 25,000 30,000

Total 415,000 610,000 723,750 772,000

DC & MoCo 415,000 510,000 563,750 605,000

Baltimore 100,000 128,000 135,000

NoVA 32,000 32,000

A number of leaders asked how expanding to new regions would impact JUFJ’s focus and resources dedicated to

DC and Montgomery County. The bottom three rows project spending by region.

Financial Profile: In 2013, Jews United for Justice is $415,000 organization whose income is derived

from 55% individual donors, 36% grants, 5% synagogues and allies, and 4% earned income. Our primary

expenditure is the staff (75%) required to lead issue campaigns, and conduct the community building

and leadership development programs that strengthen this campaign work. JUFJ is highly dependent on

the skills of both our six paid staff members and hundreds of volunteer leaders. We recognize the

ongoing need to invest in our staff and leaders, and to increase the pool of volunteer leaders in order

to continue to impact policy in our region.

1 Projects addition of a Baltimore Director and an Operations Manager 2 Projects addition of a half time Baltimore staff member, a half time NoVA organizer, and additional communications

capacity


LESSONS LEARNED FROM THE PLANNING PROCESS

This strategic plan lays out 4 major priorities for JUFJ over the coming three years. Over the course of

the three month process of developing this plan, we gained some key insights from our conversations

with staff and leaders. 3

WHAT HAS DRIVEN THE ORGANIZATION’S SUCCESS & GROWTH?

The three key drivers of JUFJ’s success in recent years have been picking the right campaigns,

attracting, training, and retaining fantastic volunteer leaders, and hiring excellent staff.

PICKING (MOSTLY) THE RIGHT CAMPAIGNS

We’ve made a number of smart choices in recent years in choosing campaigns that we both won and

helped us grow at the same time, and a few that haven’t. Based on this experience, successful

campaigns that strengthen JUFJ:

Are winnable over a relatively short timeline (6-18 months ideally) and have clear end points.

Feel urgent – a sense created externally like an election day or a vote that has to happen.

Feel important, and part of a bigger narrative (in the news or zeitgeist).

Have a clear role for JUFJ to play in the campaign, not just more people supporting the cause, and

we have people in the right place to make a difference (moving particular councilmembers).

Resonates strongly with our base. This is complicated since few issues that we work on fit into

traditional understandings of self-interest.

Have trusted and capable partners leading the campaign, with strong staff relationships

Have strong leaders running the campaign for JUFJ.

ATTRACTING, TRAINING, AND RETAINING FANTASTIC VOLUNTEER LEADERS

Again and again we’ve found that our campaigns succeed when we match leaders to roles they can

succeed in, and struggle when we don’t have quite the right match.

We’re at our best when our leaders have strong personal relationships with each other and/or

with the key staff member. This network of strong relationships might be the single most important

factor in whether or not a campaign succeeds and builds JUFJ’s base.

The Jeremiah Fellowship has been a critical pipeline of top leaders for JUFJ. This is true both

because it creates highly trained leaders, and because it creates the strong relationships between

these leaders as noted above.

Best results come when we’re thoughtful about putting people in positions to succeed. This means:

3 We held four meetings with members and leaders to get input on this document. At the February Community Meeting,

nearly 100 members shared their hopes for JUFJ’s future and reacted to the idea of creating a 501c4 sister organization to

engage in electoral activities. We also held two meetings of key leaders, bringing together a total of 20 existing leaders from

Northern Virginia, DC, and Montgomery County to react to an initial draft of the conclusions and lessons learned sections

of this document. We also held a small meeting of six existing JUFJ leaders with experience in electoral activities to discuss

the viability and wisdom of JUFJ pursuing this strategy.


o offering entry level opportunities and testing people before giving big leadership roles,

o making smart and compelling asks of leaders that match with their skills, making it clear to

them why we are asking them specifically for this particular thing, and accepting no as an

answer when we need to

We genuinely value our volunteers. They feel valued as people and not as numbers.

One of the ongoing challenges is that often we have fantastic leaders and not the right match for

them. Putting them in a bad match doesn’t work, but at the same time, “you can’t just put leaders

in the freezer and expect to defrost them whenever you need them.”

HIRING FANTASTIC STAFF

Even as a community organizing group that relies on volunteer leaders to accomplish much of the

work, we wouldn’t have been so successful in recent years without a crackerjack staff.

We’ve consistently hired smart, reflective, entrepreneurial, and driven staff, who aim high but don’t

have big egos, and excel at communicating and connecting with our members.

Staff does a huge amount of work to identify, recruit and train leaders, to do the background work

necessary so that leaders can effectively engage with the campaign, and to fill in where anything

slips between the cracks.

In many ways, having a staff that works with and supports volunteer leaders is harder than just

having staff drive everything. It requires the right balance of judgment about what staff should take

initiative with and where volunteers should lead, the ability to match leaders with roles, and tact in

being a gentle but effective nudge to get things done.

As we’ve grown, staff has taken on work that we used to rely on volunteers to do. This is a difficult

dance because sometimes that means that we become more staff driven, but we’re also able to do

so much more than when everything relied on the availability of volunteers.

ADDITIONAL LESSONS LEARNED

1. CAMPAIGNS

The campaigns that have caused the most growth (Invest in DC, Dream for Equality) met all the

qualities of successful campaigns outlined in this document. Notably, because these campaigns had

strong leadership with clear strategies, we could focus nearly all of our attention on educating and

mobilizing Jews in support. In other campaigns that did not lead to the same growth (Walmart, Fair

Purple Line, the first year of Paid Sick Days), the lack of clarity on what we were trying to

accomplish meant that volunteers spent a lot of time figuring out what to do, and less time doing.

2. GENERAL DIFFERENCES BETWEEN YOUNGER URBAN JEWS AND OLDER SUBURBAN JEWS

a. What people are looking for from JUFJ: There are striking differences between what our

younger, typically non-synagogue-affiliated members are looking for, and what older,

typically synagogue-affiliated members want from the organization. In two focus groups,

which included twenty of our most active members, younger leaders without children


describe JUFJ as their Jewish home, a primary identity, and a place they go to for friends and

to feel like they belong. They seek relationships and a way to feel grounded and connected

where they live. For our older leaders, JUFJ provides a meaningful way to integrate their

commitment to social justice into their lives. Their Jewish lives are already full – often and

especially with synagogue commitments. They aren’t looking for new relationships; they

want an efficient and meaningful way to make a difference.

b. Finding Jews: DC has a strong and diverse ecosystem of Jewish organizations. Many of our

leaders are also connected with institutions like 6th & I, Moishe House, Avodah, DC Beit

Midrash, the DCJCC, and local synagogues and minyanim. This ecosystem helps to identify

and network young Jews seeking community and makes this generally hard-to-organize

demographic easier for us to find and connect to in DC. And because of their involvement

in other Jewish institutions, they come to JUFJ with a valuable and organizable web of

relationships with other Jews.

It is much harder to find new potential members – especially those not connected to Jewish

organizations - in the suburbs. Fewer Jewish institutions are engaging with and creating

networks among this demographic, people are more spread out, and they are in different

phases of life. This makes it harder to find people who are looking for or interested in

progressive Jewish community, and when we do find them, they have smaller Jewish

networks to draw on and organize.

c. Relationships between leaders: In our experience, to the extent that suburban Jews are

connected with other Jews, it is primarily through their synagogues. They are often less

connected with Jews in Jewish settings outside that community, and generally aren’t seeking

new relationships. This may be different in suburban town center settings like Rockville,

Bethesda, Silver Spring, and Alexandria with higher concentrations of younger Jews. By

contrast, many of our DC leaders are generally looking for new relationships, are active in

multiple Jewish communities, and have correspondingly wide networks.

This has significant implications for how we structure our campaign leadership. Over the

past five years we have found that our campaigns have the best outcomes when our leaders

have strong relationships with each other because they want to work together and they feel

accountable to each other. But based on the relational network in the suburbs, the

structure for our Dream for Equality campaign was a series of relatively independent

synagogue-based teams that related with JUFJ’s staff, but not very much with each other.

3. HUNGER FROM A PORTION OF OUR BASE FOR RELATIONSHIP AND COMMUNITY BUILDING

In recent years, we’ve focused our time on mobilizing the Jewish community where we have the

ability to make a key difference in a local campaign. That focus has meant less attention on public

education efforts and community activities than in our earlier years. It is increasingly clear that

many of our younger leaders keep coming back to JUFJ because of the relationships and community


that JUFJ fosters. To continue to attract and retain leaders who are critical for our campaign work,

we should put additional attention into relationship and community building activities.

4. LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT

Though we’ve identified that having the right leaders for campaigns is critically important, our

leadership development work is narrowly focused on our two fellowships. This leaves a big gap in

training and support for campaign leaders, and it’s something that needs to be addressed quickly.

5. MAINTAINING JUFJ’S GRASSROOTS FEELING AS OUR STAFF GROWS

One of the primary tensions the staff feel is balancing our identity as an authentic grassroots

organization, where leaders really own and lead the work, with the reality that staff expertise and

relationships are central to our campaigns. We’re conscious of (and made somewhat

uncomfortable by) the fact that as the staff has grown in recent years, it taken on many roles that

volunteers played in the past. On one hand, this has enabled us to take on more campaigns, hold

bigger events, and make more of an impact. On the other hand, we worry that when staff take on

these roles, volunteers feel less ownership and step back.

In the focus group conversations, the majority of our leaders agreed that this is a tension, but felt

that JUFJ was doing a good job of walking the line. Two missteps were cited. One is the role of

campaign chairs – it can be very difficult for leaders to actually direct a campaign’s strategy when

many decisions are made in daytime coalition meetings. The second is JUFJ’s campaign selection

process, with the concern expressed that we didn’t use the weighted voting process that many

leaders are proud of to choose the Dream for Equality campaign.

Our affiliation with Bend the Arc and Jewish Community Action increases our network of

colleagues, and creates opportunities to learn with other organizations navigating these challenges.

6. JUFJ’S ROLE IN CAMPAIGN STRATEGY

In recent years JUFJ has played a larger role in guiding coalition strategy, particularly Invest in DC &

Paid Sick Days, than in our early years, when we usually joined externally-led campaigns as allies.

Taking on this role can help us carve out an effective role for JUFJ, and enable us to consider

campaigns that without us wouldn’t have enough leadership to move forward on a timeline that we

could consider. However, there are also downsides. Doing so requires significant time from Jacob

and/or Elizabeth – time that is in short supply. It also puts into tension our commitment to partner

with and follow the lead of marginalized communities most affected by issues, and can lead to

campaign leaders feeling disempowered (as described above).

7. CONCERNS ABOUT EXPANSION

Many leaders were concerned that expanding to new geographic regions might distract JUFJ from

our focus in DC. They felt protective of JUFJ’s work and didn’t want to see it diminished by divided

attention or backlash from engaging in electoral activity. But the majority of leaders were also

excited about the potential for impact that we are considering.


Our deepest gratitude to the JUFJ leaders who

contributed their time and insights to preparing

this plan. We look forward to hearing back from

our members and to working with you all in the

coming months and years to make it a reality.

Please share your feedback with me and any

other leaders or staff, or write to [email protected].

Jacob Feinspan, Executive Director

mailto:[email protected]

from strength to strength: jufj strategic plan

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strength strategic plan