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Friday August 7, 1998

JCF reopens Sonoma office, hopes to restore relations

NATALIE WEINSTEIN
Bulletin Staff

Two years after closing its Sonoma County office to cut costs, the S.F-based Jewish Community Federation has returned.

The relationship between the federation and Sonoma County's Jews, however, will never be the same. They hope it will be better.

In the two years since the federation left, Sonoma's Jews built a more self-reliant community and created their own nonprofit agency. As a result, they were able to negotiate a new formal alliance with the federation that officially kicked in July 1.

The partnership gives area Jews more control over how federation donations are spent locally and provides a steady source of income to the Jewish Community Agency of Sonoma County, the nonprofit that formed when the federation left.

"What's happened is really remarkable...We've done something unique with the federation -- something the federation has never done before," said Michael Mundell, JCA president.

Federation leaders are glad to be putting behind them the original decision to close the office.

"It was the right thing to do financially. But often what works well on paper doesn't work well in real life," said Seth Moskowitz, the JCF's former assistant executive director in charge of the annual fund-raising campaign.

"They were mad. It really spurred them on. The trick now is not to lose that energy."

Under the new agreement, the JCF and the JCA will remain separate entities but will share staff and office space in Santa Rosa.

The federation will cover nearly all administrative expenses for the joint office -- $104,000 for 1998-99. This fiscal year, the money will come through the Jewish Community Endowment Fund. Next year, it may come through the JCF's administrative budget.

Carolyn Metz, who previously headed the JCF's Sonoma County office and was then hired by the JCA, will now work for both agencies. She will remain JCA executive director and has returned as the federation's regional-office director.

Another big change falls into place next year. Twenty-five percent of any new money raised in Sonoma County will be put aside, and a committee of Sonoma's Jews will decide how to spend those funds in their county.

"It's much more personal, local control," Mundell said.

Even with the new partnership, however, both sides agree that the past anger hasn't completely dissipated.

"There is a sense of mistrust out there," Mundell said.

When federation leaders originally decided to close the Sonoma County office, they acknowledged it was strictly for financial reasons.

Maintaining the federation office and staff in Sonoma County had cost $90,000 annually. In addition, the federation sent more than $30,000 directly to the county each year for two Jewish nursery schools, a children's summer camp and activities for seniors.

Sonoma's Jews, however, had been contributing about $200,000 per year to the JCF -- a figure federation officials had expected to be much higher after a dozen years of operating an office there.

Moskowitz said federation leaders were wrong to assume that Sonoma County would become an instant gold mine.

"I think you need to look at Sonoma and Napa in the long term," he said.

What irked Sonoma County's Jews wasn't the plan to shut the office, but the abruptness of the closure.

They were led to believe the office would close at the end of June 1996. Instead it happened with one-day's notice that April. Metz, who had headed the JCF's Sonoma County office since it opened in 1984, was immediately laid off.

The JCA incorporated in June 1996 and took over some of the federation's former activities, such as organizing an annual festival called Simcha Sunday. The agency also hired Metz as its executive director.

By that fall, Mundell and Metz said, federation leaders began to reconsider the decision to close the office. But the JCF couldn't simply reopen it.

"They needed to re-form a relationship," Metz said. "People were very angry and very upset and felt really abandoned and not considered at all."

Federation leaders, she added, "kind of needed to mend fences."

Meanwhile, the federation continued to raise money in Sonoma County out of its San Francisco headquarters. And it continued to give money to the county's Jewish nursery schools, camp and seniors' activities.

Still, contributions to the federation dropped. According to Metz, Sonoma's Jews donated $215,000 to the 1995-96 campaign vs. $175,000 to the 1997-98 campaign.

Moskowitz, however, said he didn't consider it a "significant drop."

At the same time, the JCA was able to raise $60,000 in donations and attract another $37,000 in grants over the past year from the federation's Jewish Community Endowment Fund, the Koret Foundation and the Charles Revson Foundation.

Negotiations between the JCA and the JCF took awhile before both sides were satisfied.

"When we thought of the future of the JCA, we liked the independence we had and that we were supported by the community," Metz said.

"We needed to come back as equals. There is an understanding now that we are not Marin County or the north Peninsula or the south Peninsula. We are something we consider unique."

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