Dear Community Members,
May was a busy month filled with community-wide events!
Thank you to everyone who generously gave their time on Sunday May 7th for the Community Forward Planning Day! Through 9 months of Community Conversations, and consultations with the Jewish community, over 4,700 pieces of data were collected from 400 individual and 45 groups conversations, compiled and analyzed to identify 5 main themes.
Community Planning Chair, Carol Duboff, and members of her committee led the group of 50 participants on May 7th to identify priorities for action planning focused on those themes. The following are theme highlights:
Connections and Jewish Identity – The action plan will require all programs, institutions and actions to go beyond establishing a sense of welcome, to deepen the sense of inclusion and Jewish connection.
Programming for the Modern Jewish Community – Our institutions provide many much-needed services, and should focus in the future on:
- Providing for more opportunities for people to make friends and develop deeper connections
- Innovative Jewish programming
- Both experiential and informal Jewish education
Jewish Identity and Experience – There was strong interest in innovative new experiences both inside and outside synagogues with new approaches to education across the demographic spectrum.
Caring Community – Some of the deep needs in the Jewish community were named repeatedly:
- Affordable housing for seniors to include support services and kosher food
- Inclusion of those struggling with poverty, addictions, mental health challenges, and more
- Addressing affordability of Jewish life for the middle class
- Ensuring availability of kosher food
Infrastructure and Community Capacity – Cohesion, coordination, collaboration, and breaking down silos were often used to express a desire for a more visibly unified community. Specific suggestions for areas for coordinated action included:
- Volunteer empowerment and recruitment
- Leadership development
- Communications – effective strategies for informing the community of all that is available
- Security - strengthening the security infrastructure, a topic discussed often and again this week with a national consultant...Keep reading!
At the Community Forward Planning Day, participants were asked “What speaks to you?” in each theme and then identified priorities through a “dotmocracy” exercise. Stay tuned as committees are formed to take action on priorities in each theme area! Click for the full consultation summary or to get involved, contact Faye Rosenberg-Cohen.
A note about Community Security…
The community saw our CJA dollars at work this week on the matter of Security, a concern raised on the planning day. Ryan Hartman, Director, National Community Security Program visited Winnipeg. He came to Winnipeg to consult and work with leadership on new national and local security strategies.
CIJA (the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs) is our national partner, supporting Jewish communities across the country with advocacy and government relations. Ryan works with national and community leaders to provide consultations, strategies, and support services in the area of security. While much of security planning takes place behind closed doors, we are proud to work with CIJA to improve community security in the face of new norms in society. One example of this collaboration is our Federation’s enhanced ability to facilitate access to Federal grants for infrastructure upgrades, which will have a more visible result.
Ryan is available to our community through our partnership with CIJA. He will return to help our community organizations assess security infrastructure as needed. There will also be a be opportunities to train both staff and volunteers.
We look forward to Ryan’s future visits and the potential to engage more individuals in keeping our community involved, safe and aware.
We hope to see you at these upcoming Federation events:
Check out photos from recent Federation events:
Wishing you a peaceful Shabbat,
Elaine Goldstine
Chief Executive Officer
Email
Share
RSS
