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On Tuesday evening we held our Annual General Meeting, and we want to share with you an abbreviated version of the Board Chair and CEO Report. The 2017-18 Annual Report has its own mini site, and we encourage you to read more here.

As we marked our 30th anniversary our work continued to be guided by our 2020 Strategic Priorities, and our Annual Report highlights a selection of the areas in which we made significant progress toward our 2020 goals.

One area is financial resource development, and we are very proud to announce that Jewish Federation generated an incredible $18.6 million dollars to address needs in our community, in our partnership region in Israel, and in Jewish communities in need around the world. This total comprises funds generated through the Federation Annual Campaign, the Jewish Community Foundation and special project funding.

The 2017 Federation Annual Campaign exceeded its target and generated $8.7 million, including $850,000 in special project funding. An additional $1.1 million in special project funding was raised outside the campaign to support specific programs that address community priorities.

Our endowment program, the Jewish Community Foundation, had a record year, generating $8.8 million in contributions to endowment funds, which is up 300% from two years ago.

Jewish Federation is also proud to have facilitated nearly $1.7 million in donations generated through the Bring Back Hope gala to support the humanitarian work of our trusted overseas partner, the Joint Distribution Committee; and $1.1 million in flow through.

Diversifying the ways in which Jewish Federation generates funds is a key factor in our ability to address growing and evolving community needs. By transforming the ways in which funds are generated, we can provide multiple pathways for partner agencies to access support so they can work to meet the increasingly diverse and complex needs of our community.

Many of those needs stem from trends that have the potential to impact us in lasting ways.

As the high cost of living continues to climb, the cost of living a Jewish life climbs even higher. Many community members are making agonizing choices about the extent to which they can participate in Jewish community life. Our work with our partners, donors and fund holders is focused on keeping the cost of participating low, and on providing more robust subsidies for those who need them.

Geographic dispersal continues to be a challenge, with half of the community living in cities outside of Vancouver, where it is often difficult to access Jewish programs. We have made great strides with our Connect Me In initiative, which is developing programs with community input and delivering them throughout the regional communities. We now have successful programs running in Langley, Squamish, the Tri-Cities, White Rock and more. We are also working with our partners so they, too, can extend their reach into these communities.

These broad changes affect other aspects of community life, too, and so a major focus this year has been on integrating our 2020 Strategic Priorities into our planning processes. Following the very successful affordability summit, we announced the formation of the Food Security Task Force, which is raising awareness of the issues faced by community members, exploring programs in other jurisdictions and generating potential solutions.

We are also addressing Jewish education, and in particular, part-time Jewish education. Almost 70% of Jewish children are not exposed to any form of Jewish education, and we are supporting new approaches to engage and retain families, and providing existing supplementary school programs with additional funds to support innovation. We are grateful to the Jewish Education Subcommittee, which is working with our staff to launch this program. 

Then there are those aspects of community life that affect all of us. When we began the reporting year it was shortly after the Jewish Community Centre received two bomb threats in just eight days. We acted on the recommendation of our Community Security Advisory Committee and hired a new director of security, who has been providing leadership, delivering training workshops, and building relationships with stakeholders and law enforcement.

In Israel, our work remains focused on investing for impact in the Upper Galilee Panhandle. Our Israel and Overseas Affairs Committee, under the leadership of chair, Candace Kwinter, undertook a strategic planning process to clarify their areas of focus, such as initiating a leadership program for social entrepreneurs and further developing Beit Vancouver as a model for community planning.

Click here to read more in our Annual Report.

Our Federation and our community have come a long way in the past 30 years, and several of our volunteer leaders, together with our marketing and communications department, took the opportunity of our anniversary to capture our history through a series of video interviews. The full series will be released next week, but you can watch the main video here. Many thanks to Jonathan and Heather Berkowitz, whose experience editing the Federation Magazine for many years was invaluable to this project; as well as to past Federation president Sondi Green, whose father, Arthur Fouks, was a founder of our Federation; and to Al Szajman, chair of our marketing and communications resource group, for their work on this project.

Karen James, our board chair, and I have just arrived in Israel, where she will attend the Board of Governors meetings of our partner, the Jewish Agency for Israel. We look forward to bringing you more on that next week.

In the meantime, we invite you to participate in a survey conducted by Environics, in partnership with the University of Toronto and York University, to explore the perspectives, attitudes and experiences of being Jewish. Click here to take the survey before June 30th.

Shabbat shalom,

Ezra S. Shanken
CEO, Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver