Recent Jewish federation campaigns demonstrate that collective giving remains powerful, particularly when urgency and common purpose are clear. The 2024 annual campaigns raised roughly $1.1 billion, according to Jewish Federations of North America — an increase of 7.3% over the previous year. The following year’s campaigns saw a 15.4% increase. While episodic fundraising strength can mask a structural problem — across American philanthropy, dollars are rising while participation is shrinking — not only did charitable giving to federations increase between 2023 and 2025, but the number of donors also increased by 2.7%.  

But federations face two assignments: to mobilize large-scale capital effectively, and to build broad-based Jewish participation and belonging. Success involving the first initiative cannot substitute for achieving the second outcome.

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United Way’s evolution is instructive, as this movement has transformed itself from being principally a workplace fundraiser and pass-through allocator toward a community-impact structure organized around defined outcomes such as youth opportunity, health, financial security and resilience. The takeaway is that an umbrella organization must stand for results, not simply for the efficiency of its campaign.  

Catholic Charities offers a different lesson. Its strength lies in a recognizable national network of locally rooted, operationally autonomous agencies. The national body supplies standards, training, advocacy, data, coordination and disaster capacity; local organizations deliver services within their own communities. In 2025, its 169 agencies served more than 16 million people, while the national organization provided such shared capabilities as disaster training and data infrastructure.  

Federations might integrate these two organizing elements (United Way’s focus on measurable community outcomes and Catholic Charities’ network model of strong local institutions supported by shared national infrastructure), but neither model incorporates one of the key features of the Jewish federation network: responsibility for the well-being and future of a people across local, national and global boundaries.

When envisioning a 21st-century federation, seven distinctive functions emerge, requiring new configurations of roles, resources and responsibilities on the local, regional and/or national scale:

1.) The community intelligence center

Every federation should maintain a continually updated picture of Jewish life, not merely commission a demographic study every decade. To this end, federations could publish an annual “State of Jewish Life” dashboard that identifies emerging needs, with the underlying data made available to community organizations. This would transform community planning from an internal allocation exercise into a public Jewish knowledge function.

2.) The convener and democratic table setter

The historical concept of one institution as a “central address” is too hierarchical for today. Instead, federations must be the most trusted table where difficult but essential communal choices can be made and challenges discussed.

This discussion table should include representatives from these eight constituencies:

• Philanthropists, nonprofit professionals and social entrepreneurs
• Legacy institutions and grassroots organizations
• Israeli and global partners
• Young adults and emerging leaders
• Interfaith and multiracial families
• Secular and unaffiliated Jews
• Jews with sharply different political views

3.) The manager of the Jewish philanthropic marketplace

Many donors no longer want only one unrestricted gift followed by an opaque allocation process. On these pages and elsewhere, I have written about the distinctive philanthropic space of the federated system. Contributors want choice, evidence, relationships, participation and visible results. Federations should accommodate that without becoming mere transaction processors.

A new philanthropic architecture could offer four complementary lanes:

4.) The shared-services utility

Federations, especially the major ones, should become the operating backbone for Jewish organizations that cannot economically provide every capability themselves. It is important to acknowledge that such services are high-cost items with limited returns to federations and might generate perceived challenges to organizational and operational independence.

Potential shared services include:

• Cybersecurity and physical-security procurement
• Finance, payroll, human resources, and benefits
• Insurance purchasing
• Legal and compliance support
• Government-grant administration
• Data infrastructure and constituent relationship systems
• Marketing and digital engagement
• Facilities, energy and purchasing cooperatives
• Evaluation and impact measurement

Organizations could purchase services through tiered memberships. The value proposition would be concrete: federation can save agencies money, improve quality and reduce institutional fragility.

5.) The collective-action and crisis command center

The Oct. 7 attacks and rising antisemitism reaffirmed federations’ ability to mobilize quickly. That capacity should be institutionalized rather than recreated during every emergency.

Federations would maintain a standing local emergency operations structure and protocol that might include such services as a rapid-response philanthropic fund, security protocols, key civic relationships, criteria for direct emergency giving and prenegotiated mutual aid agreements.

This model is analogous to Catholic Charities’ disaster network: local delivery, nationally supported training and systems and the ability to shift resources rapidly across communities.

6.) The gateway to Jewish participation

Federations should treat every gift, volunteer action, program registration, emergency inquiry, newcomer contact, and website visit as the beginning of a relationship — not as a completed transaction. This requires a “Jewish life navigation” function:

• A human and digital concierge for finding communities, learning, services, volunteering, travel and giving opportunities.
• Portable profiles that allow people to remain connected when they move.
• Micro-communities organized around geography, profession, culture, identity or cause.
• Small grants allowing participants to create their own Jewish experiences.
• Peer organizers who can help to build relationships outside institutional settings.

7.) The civic representative and coalition builder

Federations should continue their public affairs function but broaden it beyond advocacy. Its civic role would include:

• Convening Jewish organizations around a limited common agenda.
• Building durable relationships with other faith and ethnic communities.
• Mobilizing community members for civic participation.
• Offering reliable public information during controversy.
• Training a diverse bench of Jewish civic leaders.
• Distinguishing genuinely shared communal interests from issues on which consensus does not exist.

Envisioning a new organizational structure

The federation movement should adopt a “network operating system” with three different layers: 

A full-service metropolitan platform: A large city and major intermediate communities may be best positioned to provide the additional services and resources I have proposed above, offering some of them to smaller federations.

Regional federations: Regional structures are increasingly being put in place by national umbrella systems to serve a geographical region, creating economies of operation and avoiding duplicative programs. At a time of escalating expenses, the introduction of an integrated delivery model adds credibility to the calls for collaboration and integration of resources. 

Community hubs: The institutions would purchase most operational functions from a shared national or regional center.

As part of this reconstituted system, collaboratives organized around priority needs should be created with the intent to design and deliver core services to communities. This organizing model might include the following type structures: a Jewish educators task force, a mental health initiative, a Jewish life affordability study group, an antisemitism coordination team, an Israel-Diaspora committee and an inclusion and engagement workforce. These would allow foundations, individual philanthropists and practitioners to pool capital and expertise with federations. Collaborative philanthropy is already growing nationally; Bridgespan estimates that these vehicles deploy at least $4 billion–$7 billion annually and notes that donors value both pooled expertise and clearer strategic alignment.

A reality check here is essential. Not all federations are the same. Smaller communities most assuredly cannot institute all these operational features, depending in part on larger federations to provide for these expanded resources and services.

A new operating model cannot sit beneath an old social hierarchy. Boards will need to be more skilled and more representative. A possible model would reserve seats across five constituencies: community and institutional representatives; donors and philanthropic partners; independent subject-matter expertise and participants; emerging leaders; and people directly affected by federation-funded work. Other governing reforms would include such items as term limits and published conflict-of-interest disclosures.

In addition, there might be community advisory assemblies with real agenda-setting power and next-generation councils managing actual grant budgets.

A diversified economic model

Federations shouldn’t measure their operational health primarily by annual campaign totals but focus on multiple resilient revenue engines, among them: unrestricted annual and recurring giving, issue-based pooled funds, major and principal gifts, special/crisis campaigns, endowment and planned giving, foundation and government grants, membership or subscription revenue for shared services and corporate partnerships.

Additionally, foundations should be approached as co-designers and risk-capital partners. Federation can offer them what many cannot easily build on their own: local intelligence, a portfolio view, convening power and a mechanism for scaling successful projects. In return, foundations can underwrite experimentation, evaluation, and multiyear capacity — not merely individual programs. The synergy here is essential for both partners.

The new federation scorecard should balance money, participation, institutional health and communal outcomes:

The deepest test may be this: If the federation disappeared tomorrow, would the community lose only a fundraising vehicle — or would it lose its capacity to see itself, care for its members, make collective decisions, mobilize in a crisis, develop leaders and act as one people?

The reinvented federation should make the second answer unmistakable. Its legitimacy will come less from claiming to be the central address and more from becoming the network that helps every part of Jewish life accomplish things none could accomplish alone. In the 21st century, this framework for organizing will become an essential element in reshaping and strengthening Jewish life.

Steven Windmueller is emeritus professor of Jewish communal studies at the Jack H. Skirball Campus of HUC-JIR in Los Angeles.