While economists say the recession ended more than a year ago, you wouldn’t know it to look at Jewish nonprofits.
In an annual list released last month by the Chronicle of Philanthropy of the top 400 nonprofits in the United States, fundraising at the country’s largest Jewish charities had declined by an average of 18.5 percent in 2009 — nearly twice as much as the list as a whole, which showed a fundraising decline of 10 percent.
Twenty-two Jewish organizations made the Philanthropy 400, which ranks the country’s 400 largest nonprofits by the size of their fundraising totals. The most recent list is for the fiscal year ending June 30, 2009.
Only two Jewish charities ranked among the top 100 earners in 2009, with the Jewish Federations of North America and its overseas partner, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, ranking 45 and 78, respectively.
The S.F.-based Jewish Community Federation suffered a steep 44 percent decline, and came in at No. 278 on the list with private support of $66 million.
The year before, in 2008, the S.F.-based federation was 181st on the list with private support of $119 million — and even that was a drop of 29 percent from $167.2 million in 2007, when JCF was 115th on the list.
While conceding the recession that hit hard two years ago had a big impact on the value of donor investments and consequently on donors’ additions to donor-advised funds and foundations, JCF CEO Jennifer Gorovitz felt the Chronicle captured “a simplistic view of our community’s fundraising success.”
She countered that 60 percent of the reported fundraising decrease year-to-year “should have been attributed to the decline of additions to the JCF’s substantial donor-advised philanthropic fund program, and not to a decline if annual fundraising for the campaign.”
Elsewhere, some of the country’s largest Jewish charities took significant hits. Hadassah was down 7.9 percent to $78 million; the JDC fell 8.5 percent to $224 million; Yeshiva University dropped nearly 40 percent to $111 million; and Brandeis University was down 12.6 percent to $78 million. On the other hand, the Birthright Israel Foundation rose 46.8 percent to just over $71 million.
It seems that 2009 was an especially hard year for the Jewish federation system.
According to the Chronicle’s survey, the JFNA brought in $320.3 million in 2009, a 19.6 percent drop from the previous year (when it was known as the UJC, for United Jewish Communities).
But the JFNA says the numbers for the federations are not as bad as the report may seem. Looking at the federation system’s campaign as a whole, and including the larger federations, the 2009 annual campaign stood at $938 million, a 10 percent drop from 2008’s $1.04 billion campaign and more in line with the national averages for declines.
Locally, the Jewish Federation of the Greater East Bay and the Jewish Federation of Silicon Valley didn’t make the list of the top 400, so no data is available.
As for the S.F.-based federation, Gorovitz noted that during the period cited by the Chronicle, approximately $40 million was added to new and existing donor-advised funds.
Her federation, she says, would prefer to be “judged less on how much we raised when times were tough, rather how effectively we deploy the assets we have raised from the community to provide a safety-net response.”
In total, according to the JFNA, the federations took in $2 billion in 2009 when counting all of their assets, including endowments and foundations. This year, the federations are ahead of the 2009 pace, as they have taken in $747 million in 2010, a 3.4 percent increase over the same period of last year.
“There is a cautious optimism,” a JFNA spokesman said. “I don’t think anyone thinks we are out of the woods or that everything is great. But there is a feeling that people have really responded and stepped up to the plate, especially given that nonprofits and charities continue to be down. Our surveys have shown that there is a trust in the federation movement.”