The Bay Area’s Jewish Community Federation and Endowment Fund is undergoing a major restructuring next week — cutting its board almost in half, rewriting many of its bylaws and focusing more on key areas of communal needs — which those involved say is meant to make the organization more nimble and better able to support local philanthropy.

Philanthropist Laura Lauder has been tapped to lead the new 15-person board (down from 25), which officially enters office on Jan. 15.

“I’ve been involved in any number of Jewish organizations so far, and this is probably my highest calling to lead the federation in this new moment of transformation and of catalyzing an entirely new approach to Jewish philanthropy in San Francisco and potentially being a model for the country,” Lauder told eJewishPhilanthropy this week.

“We’ve cut the size of the board nearly in half, which is unheard of in the federation world. We have rewritten our bylaws — again, unheard of in the federation world. We have changed our mission statement to reflect our new focus on being the center for Jewish philanthropy in San Francisco. And, to be honest with you, many other federations across America are watching to see if this experiment works,” Lauder said. “We’re the first to do this. We are also the first to say that the needs in the Jewish community are so dramatically changing that we have to respond with a dramatic new invention of the federation.”

In addition to the board changes, the organization is rolling out new strategies for business growth and fundraising — through new donor-advised funds and other philanthropic services — as well as renewed focus on Jewish community impact.

The federation’s CEO, Joy Sisisky, told eJP that the “reboot” of the organization follows years of strategic planning that began under current Board Chair Eileen Ruby.

“I think some lessons that we learned during COVID were really the need to be much more responsive in the moment, to be able to be in touch and serve our community best. So when I became CEO, interim CEO even, about three years ago, we immediately started working on strategic planning in phases,” Sisisky told eJP. “Strategic planning focused on the sustainability and the long-term health of the federation. And we took a look at a number of different things. And it culminated in our governance work to make sure that we could reboot our governance to meet the needs of the organization that we were really evolving into.”

While work on this began prior to the Oct. 7 terror attacks in Israel, which has spurred “The Surge” of increased engagement with Jewish life in the United States, Sisisky said that the past 15 months have proven the need for the federation to undergo this transformation.

“People from all different backgrounds want to be engaged in Jewish life all of a sudden. Now, it didn’t happen for a good reason, but it has for many families and many individuals turned into a very positive experience to find community and to start giving back,” she said. “I hope we can really take advantage of that.”

She added that the “wild west” nature of the West Coast also lent itself to this kind of innovation.  “Most people here are entrepreneurs or they think outside the box, they’re looking to try things differently. And this was no exception to that,” she said. 

Sisisky said that by significantly reducing the board size, instituting two-year terms, three-term limits on members and changing criteria for membership, the federation hoped to change the board from a driver of engagement to a “true governing body” to direct the organization’s work. 

“One of the things that we learned in our research over the last few months while we were trying to figure out what kind of governing model would be best with us is what would allow us to be the most nimble, to make the best decisions in real time,” Sisisky said. “And having a smaller governing board with 15 people essentially serves as our executive committee. So we’re using the board as a true governing body, as an executive committee, as opposed to an engagement tool, which many other boards are.”

By having a smaller number of board members, they can “be convened at a moment’s notice,” making the organization better able to respond to breaking events, she noted.

The make-up of the board is also meant to be more diverse and better reflect the Bay Area Jewish community.

“In terms of our board, it’s really important to us that we have diversification in all sorts of ways, so that includes wealth. We ask people [on the board] to make a personally meaningful gift. And that means something really different for different people on our board because they’re in different stages of their life, they come from different backgrounds. Some of them are building wealth. Some of them already were significant philanthropists in the community,” Sisisky said.

“We feel that during this critical moment of transition for the federation to really be a center for Jewish philanthropy, it needed really tight governance. We needed people that were 150% committed to seeing this be successful,” she said.

Of the 15 members of the board, 10 of them have already been involved with the federation system and five of them are new-comers, she noted. 

“We didn’t save seats for people who were under 40. We made it just a priority for us to make sure that in every way, with diversity, whether it was young voices, racial makeup, gender, sexuality, all of those things could be taken into account to best represent our community and have some of the best minds come together to help us,” Sisisky said.

The board also includes several Israelis, reflecting the relatively large population of Israeli expats living in Silicon Valley, Sisisky and Lauder said.

The governance restructuring process was done over an extended period and actively involved the current board in order to leave space for debate and discussion and ensure that all parties supported the federation’s next steps, she said. The effort also included outside consultation and extensive interviews with other nonprofits — Jewish federations, Jewish community foundations and non-Jewish organizations — which made it “a much easier decision for our board,” Sisisky said. 

“It wasn’t like some other group of people was deciding what would be best for the organization, but our actual board members were very involved in this decision,” she said. “I think our board clearly saw that, which is why they voted unanimously for this new board, and we spent a lot of time making sure that we listened to their input and their concerns along the way.”

For instance, she said, there was initially a proposal for an even smaller board, but that this faced opposition and was changed to a 15-member board. “Every decision we made was intentional and thoughtful and came with a lot of discussion. And we left room to add people to the board over the years,” she said. 

Lauder told eJP that the organization’s “entirely new approach” to federation-based philanthropy included providing far greater support to donors, “giving them the research, the data, the information about what the needs [of the Jewish community] are and then let the donors decide.”

Unlike an orgnization like the Jewish Funders Network, which also provides such resources to donors, the Bay Area federation — which controls some $2.4 billion in assets, roughly half of it in donor-advised funds — also controls its own approximately $1 billion in funds, meaning that in addition to advising donors, it is also a grantmaker itself.

Lauder, a vocal proponent of impact investing, said the federation will also make this a core aspect of its work going forward, with a new subcommittee of the investment committee dedicated to the topic. 

“Our federation is going to focus more than ever on social impact investing. We currently have 15 options for impact investments available for our donor-advised fund holders, and we’re going to expand that even great more greatly,” Lauder said. “Our new investment committee chair has never been on the investment committee before, and the reason why we picked him is because [impact investing] is what he does all day long, he manages hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars of donor-advised-fund impact investments, and he is very familiar with this field. And so he knows very, very well how important it is to get it right.”

DAF holders can already make social impact investments through the federation, and Lauder said the organization was considering licensing, or “white labeling,” its platform so that other federations can use it.

“So if a federation in another community would like to provide impact investing options to their donor-advised fund holders, then they can white label our platform and put their own investments on the platform,” Lauder said. 

Lauder added that the Jewish community in the Bay Area — one of the more liberal parts of the country — is a bellwether for some of the larger trends taking place in the United States, from interfaith marriage rates and assimilation to antisemitism and anti-Zionism.

“San Francisco is the canary in the coal mine for what’s happening to American Jewry, and we have to show effective ways of addressing these issues,” she said.