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Friday August 11, 2000

Brandeis Hillel of S.F. transforms fund-raising into child's play

JOSHUA BRANDT
Bulletin Staff

The movers and shakers behind an effort that raised almost $500,000 for a local women's shelter had to be driven to their board meetings.

That's because none of the 33 members of a fund-raising group at Brandeis Hillel Day School in San Francisco had a driver's license.

A year ago, La Casa de las Madres, a San Francisco agency that offers shelter and services to battered women and their children, was looking for money to implement an at-risk teen program.

"The search for funds was extremely difficult," said Kathy Black, the associate director of La Casa de las Madres. "There was no money available in the city budget, and we weren't able to secure financing from other sources.

"We were really stuck."

Enter the Seventh Grade Fund, a Brandeis Hillel Day School committee now in hiatus.

The group was formed about three years ago by Michael Kesselman, whose daughter was then a seventh-grader at Brandeis and preparing to celebrate her bat mitzvah.

Kesselman noted that many of today's b'nai mitzvah students often have discos, sushi bars and mounds of presents -- but very little sense of tzedakah.

What made the point even more poignant for Kesselman was that a typical b'nai mitzvah celebration often nets the recipient $20,000 in gifts, many of which were quickly forgotten. "It just dawned on me," said Kesselman, "that the original meaning of the ceremony had been lost -- to become a member of the adult Jewish community by giving back to it."

Furthermore, he felt that the "materialistic ethos" of many bar and bat mitzvah celebrations fosters inequities among students.

Kesselman, a former program officer with the S.F.-based Koret Foundation, suggested the idea of having the children and their parents donate money into a fund that would be dispersed to various nonprofits.

After some doing some serious "soft-selling," Kesselman was able to convince the Brandeis families to consider the program, which called for each family to contribute $300.

Within two years, the Seventh Grade Fund had contributed $13,000 to various Bay Area non-profit organizations.

La Casa de las Madres was targeted by the Seventh Grade Fund to receive a grant, although the original amount was $2,500. That figure changed when Kesselman suggested that La Casa write a major grant proposal, which the Seventh Grade Fund would then use to spearhead other fund-raising efforts.

In assuming the role of lead funder of the La Casa project, the Brandeis group approached the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Evidently, the sight of 33 teenage fund-raisers was a powerful, persuasive tool. The foundation agreed to kick in $225,000 for the project, matching the funds already raised by the shelter.

"The Seventh Grade Fund was an incredible help...they gave us an entrée to people who might not otherwise have listened to us," said La Casa's Black. "The grant gave us three years worth of funding."

Although the Seventh Grade Fund is currently in abeyance at Brandeis, other area institutions in the area have picked up the idea and run with it. One of them is Temple Isaiah in Lafayette, which just completed its second cycle of fund-raising, including raising more than $16,000 for children's issues and more than $17,000 for medical research issues.

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