By Donald H. Harrison
SAN DIEGO — Already Jewish Family Service has named the administrative wing of its Turk Family Center at 8804 Balboa Avenue for Jill Borg Spitzer. If some visitors walking down the corridor should chance to look up and ask, “What did she do?” how would they be answered?
The community will get a better idea of that March 3 when a celebration of Spitzer’s tenure is scheduled to begin at the Heart and Soul fundraising gala at the Hyatt Regency La Jolla
But some things can already be said. Spitzer spent 26 years as the executive director of Jewish Family Service. She helped JFS grow from an agency with a $500,000 budget into a $20 million-a-year enterprise with more than 50 programs addressing the needs of community members in every stage of their lives.
Spitzer was reared in one of the few Jewish families in Hoboken, N.J., and credits Jewish summer Camp Lakota in the Catskills for helping her to love her Jewish identity. She went on to attain her bachelor’s degree at Adelphi University in New York, going on to Columbia University for her master’s of social work. Her first job came during the era when New York was beginning to deinstitutionalize the mentally ill. She helped set up community-based programs in Brooklyn to provide them with care. After several years there, she moved to Denver where she went to work for Jewish Family Service.
During a recent interview, Spitzer reflected that when she arrived in Denver in the 1970s “a lot of JFS’s were very much counseling agencies. They were well known, well respected. They had great therapists and it (JFS Denver) was one of those places where you could get therapy on a sliding scale with really excellent therapists.” As the new hire in Denver, Spitzer was assigned “all the cases that no one wanted,” many of them involving elderly persons living in stressed circumstances. “So I started working with them, first from a very clinical social work perspective, and realized that the answer to every problem they brought was not therapy.”
In other words, the seniors’ problems could be ameliorated not by talk but by action. For example, “We (JFS Denver) were able to hire a nurse to go along with a social worker into the homes of some of these elderly people and assess what their health needs were. The University of Colorado had a dental school, and we actually had an in-home dental program that we were able to set up with them. We started a home-delivered meals program. We did a lot of those things that were meant to help people age in place. Most seniors, most elderly, want to age at home, stay at home.”
Even as this programming was being implemented, Spitzer recalled, “there came the great migration of Soviet Jews, and I was asked to take on that program (in Denver) as well. So basically I was the administrator of two different types of programs.”
Marriage to Mark Spitzer brought her to San Diego, where JFS was a natural place to look for work. However, there were no immediate job openings, so Spitzer went to the Linda Vista Health Care Center, where, drawing on similar problems experienced by Soviet Jewish refugees, she specialized in health care issues facing refugees from Indochina. In December 1984, however, a position opened up at JFS — quite a good position — as director of professional services, a title that was tantamount to assistant director, under JFS Executive Director Marianne Kaye.
“Jewish Family Service of San Diego was actually like the Jewish Family and Children’s Service of Denver seven years before, in that we were mostly a counseling agency,” Spitzer recalled. “When I became the executive director about a year and a half after I arrived, in 1986, it was right after my daughter Rebecca was born. In fact, I interviewed very pregnant and it was a probably a question and an issue for some whether to hire this person.”
In addition to counseling, JFS San Diego had a Meals on Wheels program and a small office in Encinitas, which was basically for counseling. But JFS was “hearing from our clients, hearing from people in the community, about what we needed to do, what were the major issues, and without a lot of consultants, or things like that, just listening and talking and hearing about what was needed, we began developing new programs,” said Spitzer.
Drawing on advice from Jack Stern, then JFS president; Sam Ackerman, immediate past president; and clinical director Evelyn Rady, and in consultation with the United Jewish Federation, “we began to expand our reach and really look at what we could do to help people in need. It always came down to that — who are the people who need our help?” said Spitzer.
“That has always been for me one of the great things about JFS… the ability to assess what the needs are, conceptualize what it is that we need to do to help somebody, put together an action plan, a proposal, or grant, or whatever it is, find people, organizations, government entities, whatever, to help support that….”
Spitzer said that “people understand that the focus of JFS is being the ‘9-1-1’ in the Jewish community. When issues of concern arise that we can address, we will be out there first. You know when the (wild) fires came causing economic crises, we were the first to call a community-wide meeting” to urge contributions and organize relief. Similarly, JFS responded “when Jewish refugees came, and when domestic violence became an issue, we started Project Sarah….”
As she looked back over 26 years tenure as executive director, Spitzer said she was proud that JFS developed senior centers in addition to its original one on College Avenue near San Diego State University. “We have board members like Ronnie Diamond, Merle Fischlowitz and others” who urged such outreach and “we have an amazing Hand-Up Food Pantry, which was one of those programs that began a little bit small and has expanded into many different areas,” she reflected.
“I don’t look back and say this was me, but rather that I was part of an organization where amazing programs were able to be nurtured,” said Spitzer. “I like the idea that we were a place where good ideas were supported, not just intellectually but in the community too, for where would we be if there was not funding from all over?
Pressed which programs, if any, were particularly special to her or bore her imprint, Spitzer replied that the car donation program was one for which she may have advocated more strongly than others.
“That had a very interesting evolution,” she said. “We started it here at JFS, a small program and we were making some good money and we were advertising on public radio. Then the public radio folks decided they wanted to get into the car donation business and we had a moment of wondering how we could turn this lemon into lemonade.” JFS said to KPBS ‘we’ll be your back office, rather than you starting your own program. It’s kind of a complicated business, and we have the state and the IRS to deal with, so why don’t you outsource it to us?’ The rest was history. We were able to not only have the local radio and TV station sign up but many, many others, and that has provided a wonderful means
of support for JFS over the years.”
For the JFS board, the idea of going into the car donation business was somewhat controversial. “I have to admit there were some folks I had to convince about this,” Spitzer said. “I felt very strongly it was something we should risk.”
Today, JFS has annual revenues of approximately $20 million, including hefty proceeds from its car donation program. “You make different kinds of decisions than when you are an agency of $1 million or 2 million,” Spitzer said. “You have to think more strategically and more long-term about what is good for the betterment of the agency and the community.”
In winning support for the car donation program, Spitzer was also enlisting backing for her goal “to diversify our income streams.” Once JFS had been a member of the Family Services Association, which included various religious-based charities. “The great problem, which eventually caused its demise, was that the Family Service Association was so reliant on the United Way that when the United Way went down it took that agency with it. They had funding that 70-80 percent relied on the United Way. …”
An important reason for JFS’s good financial health, said Spitzer, is that “we have programs and services that the community wants to support; that is what it is about. Donors think to themselves, ‘I have fewer dollars to donate; what is important to me? What will make a difference?’ And when people look around, I think they have JFS close to the top of their list. People have realized that what we do is essential to the health and well-being of our community.”
With more than 50 programs, even Spitzer is hard-pressed to name them all from memory, and she wishes her successor, Michael Hopkins, the best of luck in learning the ins and outs of them all, and possibly reprioritizing JFS’s programming.
On her watch, she said, these programs were divided into conceptual areas. Senior services is one area; and the traditional clinical service is another. Also, there is a new department of Jewish life, with programs aimed at different age segments of the Jewish community: Jewish Big Pals, Jewish Single Parents, being examples. “We have community services which are things we do for people who are having difficulty sustaining themselves in the community.” Additionally, there is the work JFS does with the migrant workers in the Coachella Valley.
What’s that about?
“We do a lot of work in the Palm Springs area,” Spitzer said. “We do a lot of work with the homeless there, the vast majority of whom are not Jewish. But because we are able to charge for a certain overhead the funds can go for the Jewish community here. Jewish Big Pals, programs for Holocaust Survivors or counseling are heavily subsidized, so sometimes there are certain good business reasons for doing things because at the end of the day it helps the Jewish community.”
As in Denver, Jewish Family Service in San Diego addressed the needs of the Soviet Jewish population, even as in years prior the Jewish community welcomed Jewish refugees who had survived the Holocaust. Later, waves of immigrants from other countries such as Iraq and Myanmar, followed and Jewish Family Service reached out to them, finding no obstacle in the fact they were of different religions and ethnicities.
“We are now the largest JFS resettlement department in the United States because San Diego is home to thousands of Iraqi refugees and HIAS (Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society) is the national organization that accepts refugees and funnels them to Jewish communities,” Spitzer said. “Most refugee resettlement is family reunification. People come where their family is.”
There is always a debate within JFS ranks over how much of the agency’s efforts should be spent specifically on taking care of the Jewish community, and how much should be dedicated toward tikkun olam, repair of the world.
Helping others “is what Jews do, it’s who we are,” Spitzer states emphatically.
Spitzer is 61, some might say too young to retire. Why did she step down?
There are other things she wants to do in her life, she replied. Attending daughter Rebecca’s wedding in San Francisco in August is one. Traveling with her husband is another.
She has been playing on a senior women’s basketball team for some time, and recently agreed to begin serving in June as the league’s director. The game is played on a half court with three-member teams, grouped by age category. Her team has competed in the senior national games. The women in the over- 80 division from San Diego have done even better than that; they are the reigning national champions.
Additionally, Spitzer said, the league raises funds to help girls to stay in school with basketball scholarships.
But don’t get the idea that Spitzer is done with the JFS just yet.
Besides agreeing to help with the fundraising, she and Hopkins are jointly developing a “parent resource center” that was funded by an anonymous donor. It will be “a place for expectant and new parents to get practical information on child rearing,” Spitzer enthused. “We are going to have an area with a play room with a one-way mirror so that we know what is going on. We can help parents in group sessions–not therapy–but really just helping with ‘how do I get my kid to stop biting his friends?’, toilet training, ‘how do I get my kid to go to sleep at night?’
“What this will do is introduce to the community a new way of looking at JFS and redefining JFS for some people. Folks see us as a place for certain programs and services, but this is more of a prevention type of mode. For families within the Jewish community, this will be something terrific…. It is a way to address an issue that is very important: how to help children with good parenting.
“One of the ideas is to have something called ‘Baby Boot Camp’ for people who are expecting, and then the next year bring the people who were pregnant together and help them through the first year, which is very difficult. Being together, they’ll be a support system for each other, but with the JFS expert there to help them figure out how to raise their kids.”
Spitzer said that Hopkins, whose background is in running Jewish Community Centers, is “the perfect kind of person to take this program and work with it, and I think he will do a fantastic job in helping us understand how to market it and get it operational quickly, so I think it is a very exciting program for JFS.”
So what can be said to someone who passes by the sign labeling the Jill Borg Spitzer Administration Wing? Well, one could say, that she championed a wide variety of programs to fit the needs of the Jewish and general communities, and successfully diversified the agency’s funding sources.
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Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World. He may be contacted at donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com