After almost 10 years, Ted Feldman has left his job as executive director of Jewish Family and Children’s Services of the East Bay. Avi Rose, who has worked with a number of area nonprofit agencies, is serving as the interim executive director while a search is conducted for a replacement.
Feldman hopes to serve as a part-time rabbi and do nonprofit consulting work.
At the time Feldman became executive director, “we were receiving no outside grants and we’re now getting $1 million in outside grants,” said David Biale, president of the JFCS board. “There’s been enormous growth in the agency.”
According to Biale, Feldman and the board made a mutual decision that perhaps it was time for someone new to take the organization to the next level.
“He’s done an incredible job in transforming the agency, and we came to a mutual agreement that this was indeed time to find new leadership with perhaps a different set of skills and fresh eyes to look at the complexity of what we’re doing.”
Biale said that now more than ever, social service agencies like JFCS are bearing the burden of providing even more services because of all kinds of governmental budget cuts.
For instance, JFCS has a contract with Alameda County to do early childhood intervention.
“[Feldman] has left us with a tremendous donor base,” said Biale. “We were raising $80,000 a year and now we’re in excess of $400,000. We also got a multiyear, multimillion dollar gift from an individual that will total about $6 million. He’s left us in a very good position to move to the next level.”
Rose, who has a master’s degree in social work and Jewish communal work from the University of Southern California and Hebrew Union College, has worked at JFCS agencies in Los Angeles and San Francisco, and, therefore, is “coming home to what feels like very familiar territory with really committed people,” he said.
For the past few years, Rose has been working as a part-time consultant to a number of nonprofit agencies. Before that, he worked in the area of HIV and AIDS, running the AIDS program at JFCS in San Francisco, as well as a number of AIDS programs at other agencies.
Rose, who lives in Oakland with his partner, is also a lay service leader at Kehilla Community Synagogue, and the father of two young children. That is why he will not apply for the directorship himself.
However, he said, “it’s a wonderful agency, and I’ll be here until they hire and orient the right person to be the right ongoing executive director.”