With the holiday season underway and temperatures dropping in many parts of the country, it’s safe to assume that most of us aren’t thinking about summer camp. Yet within a few months, camp registration for the summer of 2022 will shift into high gear.
The 2022 camp season offers an opportunity for camps to return to some semblance of normalcy after two summers of pandemic-induced closures and modifications.
Like other summer camps, programs serving Jewish young people were hit hard in 2020 as the pandemic set in, closing Jewish overnight camps and many Jewish day camps. “It was really an existential challenge,” said Jeremy J. Fingerman, CEO of the Foundation for Jewish Camp (FJC). “We recommended to everyone that they return or offer to return the tuition that had been paid because you’re in a long-term relationship with the customers, the parents. In doing so, it created a $150 million funding gap.”
But financial hardship wasn’t the only concern for Jewish communal leaders, camp directors and philanthropists. Camp closures and limited enrollment also meant missed opportunities to connect young campers and counselors to Judaism.
“Jewish camps are one of the most effective ways of connecting kids to their Jewish heritage and Jewish identity,” Fingerman said. “So we had to find a way to get these camps reopened [in 2021] because camp shapes the community of today and it’s the glue that keeps it together tomorrow.”
Formerly known as the Foundation for Jewish Camping, FJC is a public foundation created with seed money from Wexner Heritage Foundation fellows and philanthropists Elisa and Robert Bildner in 1998. The foundation advocates for and provides resources to 300 Jewish day and overnight camps across North America.
To address the crisis, Fingerman said, “we aligned the field and funding community around the collective effort to mitigate the $150 million [shortfall].”
It was a three-pronged effort. First, the camps reduced their expenses by $25 million. They did this by laying off or furloughing personnel, deferring maintenance and renovations to camp facilities, making reductions in office and equipment rentals, and renegotiating bank loans.
Next, they borrowed funds through the federal government’s PPP program and from the newly formed Jewish Community Response and Impact Fund, or JCRIF. JCRIF is a consortium of Jewish foundations created in 2020 to address funding gaps in the Jewish community caused by the pandemic. Members include the Aviv Foundation; Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies; the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Foundation; the Jim Joseph Foundation; the Maimonides Fund; the Paul E. Singer Foundation; the Diane and Guilford Glazer Foundation and the Wilf Family Foundation, in partnership with Jewish Federations of North America. In total, JCRIF raised $90 million, of which $15 million was earmarked for Jewish camps.
The remainder of the funding gap was filled by camper tuition rollovers (over $60 million) as well as emergency grants from Jewish federations and from local and national foundations, and donations from camp parents (over $65 million in total). “That allowed the camps to at least be able to stay in business and recruit for 2021,” Fingerman said.
In 2021, FJC partnered with camps on their reopening strategies and helped set the stage for most camps to open. FJC also facilitated capacity expansion grants for 51 camps totaling $3.8 million, enabling them to serve more campers and generate more profitable revenue while complying with local COVID safety protocols.
Eric Fingerhut, CEO and president of the Jewish Federations of North America, said funders appreciate working with FJC because they believe in the organization’s mission and have confidence in its leadership and strategic plan.
“There are very few things that we can get everyone to agree on. I think the value and importance of Jewish camp, and it being a priority for federations to support and encourage, is one of those things. If you find someone in our federation system that disagrees with that, I’d be shocked,” says Fingerhut.
“The level of professionalism at FJC is extraordinarily high,” Fingerhut went on. “From the perspective of philanthropy, it’s the merger of mission and leadership. You might care about an issue, but you’re not necessarily going to make a major gift to an organization if you don’t feel that the organization has the confidence, the sophistication to carry out that mission. I think the reason that camping is so successful in philanthropy is that it really represents both of those things.”
Barry Finestone of the Jim Joseph Foundation shares Fingerhut’s admiration for the mission and the professionalism of FJC. The foundation recently announced a $12 million grant for the organization. “We’ve been a long-time trusted partner of FJC for the last number of years,” Finestone said. “Previous grants have totaled in excess of about $50 million.”
But Finestone says this new grant is different from previous grants. “The prior grants were related to the launch of what we term ‘specialty incubator camps,’ where we, along with a funding partner or two, give money to launch brand new camps [with specializations in sports, arts, technology, etc.] and incubate them.” The new grant, on the other hand, will support general operating expenses.
“This time around, the grant was really a way of bolstering FJC, our long-trusted partner,” Finestone said. “We believe in the [Jewish camping] field. FJC built a wonderful strategic plan and they’ve done an amazing job over the last two years. When we get to that stage with a few select partners of ours at the foundation, we believe that the best type of dollars to give are general operating dollars. There’s a lot of debate about that in the field, but we at the Jim Joseph Foundation are big believers in general operating funds. The general operating funds allow them to shift dollars around [and use them as needed].”
Both by distributing general operating funds and by serving as hubs for expertise and fundraising, organizations like FJC can act as advocates, intermediaries or simply as a way for far-flung nonprofits in a specific niche to keep in touch. In times of trouble, they can be the unsung infrastructural heroes of the philanthrosphere.
While not every such intermediary organization proves effective, these kinds of entities are a growing part of the funding landscape. That trend will likely continue as more philanthropic dollars slosh around in the coming years.
“The pandemic very much solidified the import of FJC, acting as an intermediary for the field,” Finestone said. “There are 160 or 170 Jewish [overnight] camps that span the country and there’s no way for us at the foundation to know what your camp needs. I need a team of 50 people to do that and FJC just played an incredibly productive and magnificent role in so many ways.”