The debt ceiling limit deal will be felt in many ways, and it’s already being felt in one area: social agencies such as the Jewish Federation are feeling the financial pinch more than ever — and it raises some other issues as well. Here’s a must-read article from the Jewish Daily Foward:
The budget deal in Washington and the near certainty of steep declines in federal funding for social services have created a challenge for Jewish communal federations across the country: How to maintain support for hospitals, nursing homes and other services while continuing to provide the education, identity and Israel programs that their donors want?
Federations already spend between one-sixth and one-half of grant allocations on social services. Drops in federal funding may bring pressure to increase the size of those grants relative to other priorities, but federation officials insist that they will instead address the cuts by raising additional money and reducing redundancies.
“It’s very hard for the organized Jewish community and for federations to address this problem squarely and take proactive decisions, because they are understandably afraid of alienating single-issue donors,” said Marshall Breger, a professor at the Columbus School of Law, The Catholic University of America. Breger wrote a widely circulated essay on the subject in a recent issue of Moment magazine.
Jewish federations serve as a clearinghouse for charitable giving, taking donations from members of a local Jewish community and redistributing the funds among grant recipients. In addition to social services, those funds are used to support Jewish education, identity-building initiatives like Taglit-Birthright Israel, and causes in Israel and overseas through the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and the Jewish Agency for Israel.
The proportion of federation funds earmarked for social services varies widely by city. Among the 18 largest federations in the United States that provide funding breakdowns on their websites, the proportion ranges from 14% at the Greater Miami Jewish Federation to 49% at the Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia.
According to the latest figures available, the federation in New York allocated 47% of grants to local social services; those in Washington, Boston and Cleveland allocated between 31% and 33%; federations in St. Louis and Chicago between 24% and 25%, and federations in Detroit and Pittsburgh, 17%.
In the essay, published in the May/June issue of Moment, Breger argued that those proportions will need to rise to compensate for the drop in federal dollars. But federation leaders said that funds shouldn’t be shifted from fields such as Jewish education and Israel to replace lost federal money.
There’s a lot more so go to the link to read the rest.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.