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Friday April 13, 2007

What can American Jews learn from our northern neighbors?

by gary wexler

When American Jewish leaders hear I’m consulting in Canada, they often comment that Canadian Jewry is years behind American Jewry. But I see them as being ahead of us.

I’m involved with UJA-Federation of Toronto as the marketing partner in an infrastructure campaign that is raising nearly $300 million over a seven-year period. The federation has raised more than half the amount while doubling what it raises in its annual campaign during the same period.

As Toronto Jews re-envision their community, they’re rebuilding it in three geographical areas of what is referred to as the Greater Toronto Area: the vibrant, gentrified downtown area; in the north of the city where the major Jewish population is; and in the far northern region where young Jewish couples are moving.

Throughout this project the federation is partnering with community institutions as the actual fundraising arm — identifying mega-donors, cultivating them and ultimately making the request.

They’re building and rebuilding JCCs at state-of-the-art levels with floors of stores — the Birthright Israel store, the Mount Sinai hospital storefront, the Second Cup coffee chain and possibly commercial establishments such as the Gap and others.

In the same spirit, they’re also building and rebuilding day schools, Hillels, museums, theaters, a Holocaust center, the federation building, open spaces and celebration centers. They’re bringing in the best architects, space planners, program professionals, educators and thinkers — creative and Jewish minds.

The Vaughan campus, now called the Joseph and Wolf Lebovic Campus for brothers who made a $25 million naming gift, is described by the architect as having been designed in the spirit of the great Jewish area of Vilna and as an integral part of the community where the city streets traverse the center, filled with inspirational and spiritual design, plazas, nature and public spaces.

Through the physical building and rebuilding of their community, Toronto Jews in essence are building and rebuilding the community’s soul.

Two other critical parts have laid the groundwork for this campaign. First, unlike America’s highly mobile society, Toronto’s Jewish leaders are deeply committed to maintaining family continuity in the same city. They want their children and grandchildren to remain Jewish and in Toronto.

As a result, these leaders recognize that they must build a community of the future, creating the type of institutions that will be seen as mainstream and world class, inspiring the imagination, enthusiasm and pride of a new generation of Jews who are sophisticated and worldly.

The second and by far more important factor is their leadership. They realize that in order to achieve their dreams, they cannot just maintain a community but must work to envision one — in a big way. This has led these leaders to create big ideas and take huge.

From the start of this project, the executive director of the Toronto federation, Ted Sokolsky, risked professional safety, going out on a limb to articulate a bold vision, create big ideas and inspire allies among professional and laypeople, and ultimately to motivate Toronto’s wealthy Jews — those both deeply and peripherally involved in the federation — to donate generously of their own funds, ranging from $5 million to $25 million.

That’s what San Francisco demographer Gary Tobin describes when he talks about how federations need to move from the annual campaign business into the philanthropy business. Watching the success of Toronto, I would call this “philanthropreneurship.”

Philanthropreneurship means identifying needs, setting a bold, risky vision, then creating big ideas to be funded in order to carry out the vision.

In philanthropreneurship, the funders are viewed as investors and treated like partners. The return has to be quantifiable.

What has been the trajectory of philanthropreneurship in Toronto? In the past 20 years, Toronto grew from a Jewish community of 80,000 to nearly 200,000 due to an influx of English-speaking Jews leaving Francophone Quebec, and immigration from the former Soviet Union, South Africa, Israel and English-speaking countries around the world. Toronto also has attracted families from across Canada who are seeking a Jewish community of size, breadth, depth and multiple alternatives.

“We continue to operate this community on an infrastructure for 80,000 people,” federation director Sokolsky told me. “Physically, our institutions are old and outdated. In just their appearance, what kind of message do they give people, particularly young people, who see a new city of extraordinary imaginationrising around them?”

Sokolsky and I began discussions with potential mega-donors. We found that they believed in Jewish causes, but not in the ability of Jewish institutions to steward multimillion-dollar gifts. They trust that the university, opera house and museum could. They didn’t see Jewish institutions at the same level of prestige.

We knew we needed to design marketing strategies that spoke to these concerns as well as the donors’ Jewish pride.

We named the effort the Tomorrow Campaign and branded it as “the City.” The message was that by building the Jewish community at this level, they were actually helping build the city of Toronto. Through the campaign, donors had the opportunity to become city builders, something that may happen only once in a century.

As campaign chairs, Sokolsky enlisted two of Canada’s leading businessmen and philanthropists — Gerry Schwartz and Larry Tannenbaum, the owner of the Toronto Maple Leafs.

There was concern for the federation’s annual campaign but it has more than doubled in five years.

Toronto’s experience has shown that annual campaigns that remain flat need to follow a plan of philanthropreneurship. They cannot be in the lead; they must follow the big vision and ideas.

Philanthropreneurship is not a theory, it’s now a proven course of action. Canada, which Americans like to say is behind, is actually way ahead.

Gary Wexler is founder and president of Passion Marketing and a member of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency board of directors.

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