Partnership at the Heart of Your Federation's Future Planning

BY MARGIE BRYEN

One of the volunteer projects I do in support of my alma mater, Duke University, is serve as an alumni interviewer for high school seniors who are applying for college. For over 30 years this has been a rewarding endeavor; interviewing teens never gets old and it keeps me in touch with what life is like for current students. At each interview I begin by asking students about the role they most often play in a group situation, a school project, a club, a team, or at a job or internship. Are they a creative dreamer or a negotiator, a strategist or an organizer, a bold leader or a quiet follower, or something else?

If I had asked this question of myself, I would likely answer that it is entirely situational. Every role is unique and requires me to wear different hats. But at this stage of life, I find myself serving as both the President of my own business and as the President of Buffalo Jewish Federation. I suppose it might be obvious, if asked this question today, for me to answer: “I am a leader.” But I come to these leadership roles through my eyes as an organizer, my love of being the task-taker, and as the strategist who sees the big picture.

I spent my professional career in various positions and taking on many different roles across almost every business function, starting in sales support, and working my way up to the executive running a business unit before returning home to Buffalo to run my family’s business, Hard Manufacturing. In every circumstance, I have found the most success and joy when I can partner with passionate, energetic, and creative people that compliment my need for organization and logic. Happily, we have that recipe with our staff and volunteer leadership at Buffalo Jewish Federation. The three things highlighted in this article illuminate the way our team combines our respective strengths of leadership, organization, creativity, passion, and energy to move the Buffalo Jewish Federation forward to achieving its vision and mission.

People Planning

One of our key strategic initiatives is what we call “people planning”. We have recently outsourced our HR support functions to a Professional Employer Organization (PEO). This shift has allowed our team to focus more on the value we can provide to Jewish Buffalo through financial resource stewardship and development, Jewish engagement, and community convening and strengthening, and leave backend administration to other experts. This shift is also helping us to put better internal processes in place, such as an updated employee handbook, improved access for employees to their information, and documented roles and responsibilities. The second part of our people planning strategy is ensuring that we have solid succession plans in place to manage the organization over the next 5-10 years. This is a project that our CEO Rob Goldberg and COO Miriam Abramovich and I have been partnering on for a year, with input from members of the Federation’s Executive Committee.

Updating the Federation’s Bylaws

The Buffalo Jewish Federation, like any non-profit, is governed by a set of bylaws that dictates the rules, boundaries, and process that we follow to maintain a properly running entity. Simply put, they are the Board’s operating manual. Historically our function, like all Federations, was primarily to raise and distribute funds to organizations that enhance the well-being of Jews locally and worldwide.

But today many Federations like ours have evolved to include a secondary core function: building community and strengthening its functionality. Another significant shift is that the population size of Jewish Buffalo has declined over the last several decades. Our organization and its structure needed to reflect these changes. With gratitude to Federation Governor Harvey Sanders, a bylaws task force has spent the last several months focused on updating this essential governing tool to better align with these changes. The plan is for the Federation’s Board of Governors to approve the updated bylaws later this year.

Come Celebrate the Campaign Kickoff

Finally, as we continue to move forward strategically and creatively as a community, the Federation is looking to build upon our successes while creating new and innovative projects and processes. This includes a new format for the Kickoff event to launch the Annual Campaign for Jewish Buffalo.

The Campaign for Jewish Buffalo must continue to be successful in collecting funds each and every year if we are going to continue to thrive as Jewish Buffalo. Most of the funds we collect through the Campaign are used to invest in our own community.

A handful of years ago, we established Impact Areas as a way to structure our programmatic, professional and financial resources, to match the needs of the community. This has served Federation well by framing the Campaign’s focus areas, making the impact of gifts more tangible to our donors and more directly aligned with our programming, and as an effective way to validate the Federation’s annual budget is properly aligned. We will look to refresh these areas in the next year or so.

The size of our community may not be increasing, but we are still dedicated to working to ensure Jews and their families find places of belonging across Jewish Buffalo. We have been effective in the recent years at engaging Jews where they are, through many of our individual and collective engagement efforts offered by LiNK, HRC & JCRC. We will continue to do these and more.

This year, I hope you will join me on September 20th at the UB Center for the Arts for the Campaign for Jewish Buffalo Kickoff event, a celebration of Jewish Buffalo and all that I outlined. A new venue, with new energy - bringing together longtime friends and neighbors and sharing the upbeat energy of our mission with new friends too. Honoring Randi Morkisz for her passionate leadership and commitment to Buffalo Jewish Federation for over 20 years.

I look forward to working with professional and volunteer leaders on these initiatives and others as we continue to build upon our successes while creating new ways of engaging the community.