Shimon & Sara Birnbaum Jewish Community Center, New Jersey

Bridgewater, New Jersey, USA

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Define your vision of a Jewish Community Center (JCC). What makes yours unique?

The vision has changed a little from starting the community off and helping it grow to looking and seeing the role changing from not only service provision but also community building.
The vision of the JCC is to look at how it effectuates its role as a builder of Jewish community and in working towards collaborative programs with other Jewish organizations to help the community get a better sense of being part of a bigger Jewish community.

Imagine that you are visiting the JCC for the very first time. What drew you here? What are your impressions?

The challenge of creating a Jewish community! There was nothing out here they had poured concrete and we hadn’t even started to build the walls yet. When I came here what I saw was basically a construction site.

Tell us about the JCC's most recent accomplishment.

We’re in the process of raising $2.5 million. We have already raised $1.5 million and have another $1 million to go.

Describe an unsuccessful event or activity. How did you/would you do things differently the next time around?

In starting up the teen program instead of leaving it solely to our teen worker staff I would have invested a little bit more time of myself in making those first contacts with the synagogue, the lay leadership of the synagogue because they perceive us as being competition rather than serving their own teen population.

Does the JCC have financial partners? Who are they? How do these partnerships enable you to meet growing needs within your Jewish community?

- Local Jewish Federation
- Board of directors: who are responsible for raising money. They have no qualms about going out and asking people to make a gift.
- 90% of the money the JCC operates on is member generated.

How do you recruit, train - and retain - skilled professionals to manage and implement JCC programs?

Most of the recruiting is done through the community. Training is done on the job through supervision and through work with the executive staff. We encourage our staff to go to graduate school. During our first three years even though we were running a deficit we still gave our staff regular raises.

Does your JCC have volunteers? How do you recruit and retain them? What impact do they have on the day-to-day activities of the JCC?

We’ve worked hard with the JCC Association to help our board define its role in terms of governance and oversight and not on day-to-day operations. That’s why they hired me and that’s why I hired the staff.

Talk about the interaction between your lay leaders and professionals. How does this interaction stimulate Jewish life and the development of creative JCC programming?

I have no qualms about having my staff working directly with board members. It’s truly a collegial… Just as I would like all of my board members to feel comfortable at anytime being president; I would hope that all of the staff members that would ever want to; feel that they have the support that they need and the path that they could follow to become executive director.

Briefly list the top 5 ways in which your JCC is successful.

1. People walk in the door after being here a little while and feel that this is their second home.
2. Our board and our staff work well together, they’ve created an agency from nothing.
3. We run some really great programs, given our facility and what we have we have one of the best day camps and preschools in the county and in the area.
4. For the last 3 years we’ve turned the corner instead of running budget deficits we’re running surpluses.
5. People seeing us in the community as an institution that is involved and caring and concerned.

Now tell us 3 things that would make it better.

1. More space
2. More money
3. More time.

Think five years ahead. What will the JCC be like? How will it differ from the way it is today?

We would have raised the money to buy neighboring land so we could expand into a campus environment. So we would be looking into a partnership with one of the day schools or the Hebrew home. We’d be looking beyond the walls of the campus looking to develop our programs in some of the outlying areas…. And if it weren’t to develop those programs directly, then perhaps outstation staff on a periodic basis to help Jewish institutions in those areas so the JCC would have a presence other than in our own building.

Provide an interesting fact or anecdote about your community, past or present, or the center itself.

Somerset County (New Jersey) has more doctorates per capita than any other place in the country (U.S.A) except Los Alamos, New Mexico (home of Atomic Energy Research) because of the pharmaceutical industry.

On Site. Briefly talk about the history of the building in which your JCC is housed. How did it come to be a JCC?

10 years ago a man came to the Jewish Federation with the sole purpose of building a JCC. He helped the community raise almost $4.5 million and the building exists because of the foresight that he had, where there is strength build a JCC.