Josh Schachter: photographer, educator, environmentalist, storyteller

It’s a big deal when any organization wins a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation grant. In November, Pima County Public Library learned that it did just that, receiving $100,000 from the foundation and the Institute of Museum and Library Services to design a mobile media lab, youth media space downtown and online youth digital media-arts community in Pima County. PCPL is one of only 12 museums or libraries in the country to receive this prestigious grant. The library also will offer three summer programs for middle and high school students.

Behind the scenes in procuring funds for programs to help Tucson youth is Josh Schachter, 42, a photographer, visual storyteller, educator and community activist who holds a master’s degree in environmental management from Yale University.

“The inspiration for the work I do, with values around social justice, environmental protection and art, is my Jewish grandmother. She spoke her mind and painted till she was 97,” says Schachter. “I did digital storytelling around her. I didn’t know my own history and I learned a lot about being Jewish from her. [I discovered that she] was discriminated against in nursing school for being Jewish in the 1930s in New York.”

Schachter’s images have appeared in books, films, magazines, websites and publications from the Navajo Times to the New York Times. He has taught photography and digital storytelling to youth and artists in a variety of locales, including India and Nigeria.

Schachter, who grew up in Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y., “somehow found the Sonoran Institute while a student at Yale in 1996-97. They offered me a job in 1999.” The institute promotes conservation in the North American West. He later branched out to become a freelancer and has worked on more than 50 projects in Tucson.

Although he was trained as an ecologist, Schachter strove “to be an observer of relationships, finding empathy. I was super shy in high school. I didn’t feel comfortable speaking. I wanted other kids like me to find a vehicle for expressing who they were.”

The impetus for the library’s current grant emerged from his photography and digital storytelling programs at Voices, a Tucson-based nonprofit organization where he co-managed 110 Degrees, a youth-produced magazine. “We created a smaller-scale media center that served 20 youth,” but that was only an after-school project, says Schachter. “The need is huge in the world we live in. There wasn’t space [there] to apply skills in the real world,” helping youth who haven’t been able to express themselves or may have learning challenges.

In 2007, Schachter co-founded the Finding Voice program with Julie Kasper, an English language development teacher at Catalina Magnet High School. The program uses photography to develop the literacy skills of refugee and immigrant teens. The Finding Voice class created two collections of images and writings by students from around the world, “Home: Teen Refugees and Immigrants Explore Their Tucson,” edited by Kasper and Schachter, and “The Cover is Not the Book,” edited by Kasper. The two

educators took six of their CMHS students — including one whose home was bombed by the Taliban in Afghanistan before her immigration to Tucson — to tell their stories at a U.S. House of Representatives’ briefing on immigration and refugees in June 2008. CMHS student photographs were also on exhibit in the rotunda of the Russell U.S. Senate building.

For the current media lab project, “according to the funders,” Schachter told the AJP, “one of the main reasons they liked our proposal is because of the [youth participation] from day 1.”

The “Create It” program offering youth digital media and technology classes through PCPL started in June 2011, says Jennifer Nichols, senior librarian directing the newly acquired grant. “We received 250 applications for the youth design team to create a permanent space downtown,” she says. “We hired 15 in February who will receive a monthly stipend from the grant.”

Summer classes for youth will include “Publishing an Online Magazine”; “That’s My Take 2013,” creating a short film based on a book, with professionals from Pan Left Productions; a “First Filmmaking Workshop”; and “TV Studio Production” classes with Access Tucson.

Essential to the projects he’s worked on, says Schachter, is that they “spoke to the power of teens being able to change the lives of adults, recognizing that students are first people to treat with respect and listen to; and also to the power of storytelling.”

Plus, he says, “99 percent of youth centers are created by adults. That’s why they don’t succeed. Adults [in the current grant] act as resources, not leaders.” This project will also encourage “a sense of community, learning from others through professional mentoring. Teens will work on real vocational and avocational skills.”

And it’s a sense of community that drives Schachter, although, he says, “my real passion is pie. It’s based on being born on Thanksgiving, family and food. Inherently community activity is something you share. You don’t eat it yourself; that’s basically how I move through the world.”

For more information on PCPL summer classes for youth, contact Jennifer Nichols at 594-5562 or Jennifer.Nichols@pima.gov.

Teddy Weinberger

Since 1993 the Jewish Agency has been running a network of summer camps in the former Soviet Union. The Agency describes these camps as “a cultural lifeline to Jewish identity.” These summer camps are supported by several Russian Jewish philanthropists and by Jewish Federations in such cities as Atlanta, Baltimore, Chicago, Cleveland and St. Louis. The summer camps are free and (according to the Jewish Agency’s website) are designed “to provide children and youth ages 7-17 with a compelling and fun introduction to Jewish heritage through an up-close and personal experience, including exciting Israel-centered programs and interaction with young, creative counselors from the FSU and Israel.”

Now here’s where this story gets interesting: Many (and perhaps a majority) of the children attending the summer camps have neither Jewish parents nor Jewish grandparents; these campers receive their free summer camping experience because they were fortunate enough to have had a single Jewish great-grandparent. Why? Because a little-known rule of Israel’s Law of Return states that a minor may make aliyah if they immigrate with one parent who has at least one Jewish grandparent. The Jewish Agency’s philosophy is as follows: Judaism was persecuted for 70 years in the FSU. The great assimilation that took place, therefore, was a kind of forced assimilation, and so it’s only fitting to try to redress this situation by reaching out to non-Jewish families who have some affinity to Judaism.

I’m just wondering if the time has come for American Jews to target their own young families who, though not Jewish, would be eligible to make aliyah under the Law of Return. It turns out that there is literally a generation gap between the families who are targeted for Jewish outreach in the former Soviet Union and the families who are targeted for outreach in the United States. In America, outreach generally targets intermarried couples and their children; in the FSU outreach extends another generation to target not only the children of intermarried couples but their grandchildren as well.

Were American Jews to start supporting programs for this extra generation, the Jewish community’s target audience would jump significantly. I contacted the well-respected sociology professor Steven M. Cohen to get approximate numbers. He wrote to me to say that if Jewish outreach extended forward one generation — as it does in the FSU — we would be talking about moving from a target audience of 6+ million to an audience of almost 9 million.

Our sages teach us that Jewish charity starts at home, in one’s own community. With so many Americans struggling financially, many non-Jewish families with one spouse “eligible for Return” might welcome a chance to send their children to a free Jewish summer camp. What if this coming spring Americans read in their local newspapers that any parent with at least one Jewish grandparent could send their children to a free summer camp sponsored by the local Jewish community? My hunch is that thousands of families who have had absolutely no contact with the organized Jewish community would come out of the woodwork to take advantage of this opportunity. And if the campers came back clamoring for more of what they experienced during the summer (more Hebrew songs, more Jewish food, more Shabbat services), encouraging their parents to explore a neighborhood synagogue or Jewish community center, that would be wonderful. But even if this did not happen, the camping experience, with its emphasis on Jewish ethics and values, would make the children better Americans — to the benefit of us all.

Teddy Weinberger, who made aliyah in 1997, writes for several American Jewish newspapers.

“It’s a difficult decision,” said Shelly Zemelman, a school psychologist in Cleveland with four children. Her 16-year-old daughter, Batya, has spent four summers at Camp Stone, a modern Orthodox camp in Sugar Grove, Pa., that charges $3,500 for a four-week session. Other Jewish camps charge as much as $1,500 per week.

“It’s not a necessity like school — it’s a luxury,” Zemelman said. “If we had to send all four kids at the same time, I don’t think we could have done it.”

She said she knows several families who are considering dropping camp; one family made it work by alternating the years their children attend camp.

Jewish summer camp is not for the faint of wallet. But with new studies suggesting that the camp experience is a key component in boosting the Jewish identity of American Jews, it shouldn’t be expendable, say champions of camping.

A 2011 study “Camp Works: The Long-Term Impact of Jewish Camp,” paid for by the Foundation for Jewish Camp and conducted by Steven M. Cohen, Ron Miller, Ira Sheskin and Berna Torr, found that Jewish campers were much more likely to feel attachment to Israel, attend synagogue at least monthly, light Sabbath candles and donate to a Jewish federation than those who had not gone to Jewish summer camp. The study, which controlled for past Jewish experience, also found that camp attendance was correlated with moderate increases in the size of one’s circle of Jewish friends and the importance one ascribes to Jewish identity.

The study found that 70,000 kids attended Jewish overnight camp in 2010.

For many parents, the answer is financial aid. Camp industry insiders say applications for financial aid have risen sharply since the economic crisis hit in 2008.

“There are current campers who have fallen on hard times and families that want to join camp for the first time but can’t make it an affordable choice for them,” Jeremy Fingerman, CEO of the Foundation for Jewish Camp, told JTA.

The 150 nonprofit camps in the FJC’s network have reported increasing scholarship allocations by 25 to 100 percent — often in addition to support offered by local foundations, federations or synagogues.

Yehuda Rothner, director of Camp Stone, said that requests for financial aid at his camp have gone up by 10 percent, but that the amount requested has gone up significantly more.

Over the last five years, the camp has more than doubled the yearly allocation for scholarships, from $100,000 to $220,000. There also has been a slight increase in “bad debt” accommodation for families who between the first and second payments find themselves unable to pay.

Ramah, the Conservative movement’s camping wing with eight overnight camps and three days camps, has increased scholarship giving to $4.3 million in 2011 from $3 million in 2008, according to Amy Cooper, Ramah’s national director. The Ramah scholarships, which include funds raised by local boards, synagogues, federations and foundations like the FJC, have benefited 500 families among the 6,500 attending Ramah camps each summer.

Not all aid is doled out according to financial need. Over the last four years, the FJC says its Happy Camper program has provided 30,000 financially blind grants of up to $1,000 to entice first-time campers.

“There are some families for whom the money is critical to deciding to go to Jewish camp,” Cooper said.

Despite the weak economy, camp enrollment has continued to climb. The nonprofit camps in FJC’s network have grown by 4 to 5 percent over the last four years. Fingerman attributed the increase in part to a drop-off in enrollment at for-profit Jewish camps, which tend to cost more.

Along with scholarships and grants boosting enrollment, Rothner said another factor may be at play: parents who are sending their children to Jewish camp instead of the Jewish day schools, which cost more.

“As day school prices increase, it is forcing a difficult situation down parents’ throats, and they’re having to make those decisions,” Rothner said.

Some camp administrators say the recession hasn’t had much of an impact on enrollment because their constituency is mostly high-income families.

Howard Salzberg, who has co-owned the for-profit Camp Modin in Maine for the last 32 years, said that enrollment at the camp — which costs $6,300 per four-week session — hasn’t suffered at all.

“People forgo other things before they won’t send their kids to camp,” he said.

For the campers themselves, how their parents pay for camp is easily forgotten once they’re there.

“I’ve never made friends like that — they were the people who have made the most impact on my life,” Batya Zemelman said.

Asked if she’d known anyone who had trouble affording camp, she paused as if she hadn’t considered the question before.

“There were a few,” she said, “but there were scholarships available.”

Now they have it in writing.

A new study on the long-term impact of Jewish overnight camp concludes that those who have attended camp are more Jewishly engaged as adults, according to 13 key variables, than those who did not go to camp.

“We finally have a tool that proves Jewish camp works, that it helps create a more vibrant Jewish future,” said Jeremy Fingerman, CEO of the Foundation for Jewish Camp, which advocates for more than 155 Jewish nonprofit camps in North America and sponsored the study.

“Camp Works: The long-term impact of Jewish overnight camp” used data from 26 national studies of adult Jewish engagement, including the 2000-2001 National Jewish Population Survey, to produce the first statistical look at the effect of Jewish camping on individual as well as communal Jewish identity.

The report shows the most pronounced increase in Jewish engagement in four areas not typically associated with non-Orthodox Jewish behavior. Three of them have to do with Jewish communal identity: Camp alumni are 55 percent more likely than Jewish adults who did not attend camp to say they are “very emotionally attached to Israel”; they are 45 percent more likely to attend synagogue at least once a month; and 30 percent more of them donate to Jewish federations.

This is significant, says lead researcher Steven M. Cohen, director of the Berman Jewish Policy Archive at NYU Wagner, because those three behaviors indicate a certain level of Jewish communal commitment, and it is precisely that communal identification that many Jewish experts fear is most at risk.

“Where camp has had its strongest effect has to do with its creation of an intense, temporary Jewish community,” said Cohen.

That communal experience imprints on the individual, he surmised, leading to a greater propensity to view one’s self within a larger Jewish social network in adulthood.

The other 10 areas of investigation also revealed increased Jewish engagement among camp alumni, from a 37 percent increase in those who “always/usually” light Shabbat candles to a 5 percent increase in the number of those who “always/usually” light Chanukah candles. These 10 areas are related to an individual sense of Jewish identity.

Camp’s impact is more pronounced among non-Orthodox Jews under 49 than their elders, the report notes. That’s probably not because more young Jews have gone to camp, Cohen speculates, but because more options are open to Jews today than in previous generations, and fewer of today’s American Jews live in a primarily Jewish environment.

“If you’re a younger person, you need the intentionality of Jewish camp, or day schools or youth groups, to compensate for the loss of the organic Jewish socialization experience that characterized our parents and grandparents,” he said. “It’s as if to be Jewish today, you have to be Jewishly educated.”

Jewish day schools and youth groups also have a strong impact on Jewish identity, Cohen notes. But similar data studies have not been performed for these two institutions, so the evidence is mainly anecdotal, as it was for camping until now.

“The answer to the question of how do we keep our kids Jewish is not so mysterious,” he concluded. “Strong Jewish homes are supplemented by intensive Jewish educational and socializing experiences.”

Not surprisingly, Fingerman hopes the report will encourage foundations and philanthropists to open their wallets and increase their financial support for Jewish overnight camps.

“It should also be compelling to local federations looking for the best use of their dollars,” said Fingerman, who spent eight summers at Wisconsin’s Camp Ramah in the 1970s and now sends his own children to Camp Yavneh in New Hampshire. “Camps are proven programs in building community, not just Jewish identity.”

More than 70,000 children and teens attended Jewish overnight camp in 2010.

Philanthropist Harold Grinspoon, right, visits one of the camps his founddation is helping. Photo: Harold Grinspoon Foundation)

When Frank Silberlicht became the executive director of Camp Young Judaea in Wimberley, Texas, in 1998, he had no idea that his job eventually would change from getting a camp up and running to being the CEO of a midsized nonprofit.

But over the past decade or so, as private camps have ramped up their programming and facilities, nonprofit camps like Young Judaea in Wimberley have realized that they need to do more than just patch up their aging facilities to compete.

In Silberlicht’s case it meant evolving from a situation in which he would reach out to donors whenever something needed repair to creating an active board that raises $500,000 annually for capital improvements and coming up with a strategic plan to boost the camp’s population and facilities.

“No one ever told me about fundraising,” Silberlicht said. “Now that is a big part of my job.”

Young Judaea in Texas is one of 80 not-for-profit camps now working with the Harold Grinspoon Foundation’s Institute for Jewish Philanthropy in a program that offers consulting services to help camp administrators become more professional and millions of dollars in matching grants for improving camps.

The foundation’s benefactor, Harold Grinspoon, was the pioneer in giving Jewish children cash incentives to attend Jewish summer camp, starting a program in 1995 in western Massachusetts that gave scholarships to first-time campers. As that project was picked up by the Foundation for Jewish Camp, which took the initiative nationwide and helped increase the number of Jewish campers to more than 75,000 in 2010, Grinspoon surveyed the camps he was helping to populate and realized that they were in dire need of updating.

His institute deployed a team of consultants and mentors across the United States to work one-on-one with the camps to help them update their fundraising operations, professionalize their lay leadership boards, initiate strategic plans and improve their fundraising technology.

For camp administrators, that has meant more successful fundraising campaigns and more professional management. On the ground, campers are getting better facilities, new sports fields and renovated bunks. That helps increase enrollment, which in turn boosts the camps’ revenue streams and financial viability.

“Jewish overnight camp includes groups that are 100 years old but that had been primarily living off of income [from camp tuition], and with a lot of deferred maintenance,” Eric Phelps, the director of the Institute for Jewish Philanthropy, told JTA. “A camp could be 65 years old and have only 400 people in their database. We have helped them with technology to make sure they have a donor base of more than 6,000.”

Over the past six years the institute has helped camps raise more than $50 million for capital improvements, expansions and endowments, and Grinspoon has pitched in another $10.5 million in matching funds.

Grinspoon also is offering incentives to help camps start to think more seriously about soliciting bequests and legacy grants from donors by offering camps $25,000 in immediate grants over three years if they can meet specific goals for legacy giving. The project thus far has helped 31 camps bring in $31.8 million in legacy gifts.

The Grinspoon Foundation also is working with the Jewish Community Center Association and the Mandel Center of the Jewish Federations of North America to develop a pilot program to bring to day camps the consulting services it has used with overnight camps.

The groups commissioned a study to be completed by the end of 2010 to examine the scope of day camps and to help day camps, overnight camps and Jewish community centers work together in mutually beneficial ways.

“They have really been transformed,” said the foundation’s executive director, Joanna Ballantine. “There were facility issues and opportunity issues.”

Or as Phelps put it, “The transformation has been visible and palpable. You wouldn’t recognize some of these camps. It would be like going from Hurricane Katrina to Palm Beach.”

The foundation said it helped one of the smaller camps with which it worked to install donor management software, utilize social media to get guests to its first alumni reunion and raise more than $600,000 in two years — three times its annual operating budget.

Another camp used its Grinspoon mentor to create a strategic plan and a master facilities plan to start a $6 million campaign, of which it already has raised $4.8 million, the foundation said. The camp also has plans to become a green camp, making its facilities, programming and operations environmentally sound.

Camp Ramah of New England has worked with the institute over the past 18 months to help it enact a strategic plan that will make the Conservative camp network become more of a year-round resource to its constituents and potential constituents, board member Aaron Kass said.

“They have really helped … provide us with focus,” Kass said. “They gave us someone who was a fundamentally experienced consultant who was able to walk us through the process of doing this.”

For a camp like Young Judaea in Texas, the transformation started in 2000, when it received an unsolicited $200,000 gift that it had no idea how to handle, Silberlicht recalled. Ultimately the money was used to build an aquatics center and a couple of cabins.

More important, however, the gift set off a strategic-planning process that has helped the camp grow from 328 campers to nearly 600 and spurred a fundraising strategy that has raised more than $4 million to start an ambitious building project this year to improve its facilities.

The transformation was accomplished, according to Silberlicht, by revamping the camp’s board, bringing in lay leadership that was active, involved and thinking strategically about raising money.

“They really helped us work those things,” Silberlicht said. “Now board members work in conjunction with the camp director, and it is a team-wide effort.

“We worked on building board relationships, governance and how to recruit people for the board. We learned fund raising — if you bring a donor to the camp, how do you show the camp and make the pitch? Fund- raising is not just calling someone and asking for money. You have to get to know donors and communicate with them frequently.”