Gail Littman, endowment maven, eulogized

Editor’s Note: San Diego Jewish community leader Gail Littman died on December 21, 2012.  At a memorial service on December 27, 2012, the community gathered at Temple Adat Shalom in Poway, where Littman was a past president, to mourn her loss.  Among those eulogizing her was Marjory Kaplan, executive director of the Jewish Community Foundation, where Littman was a key staff member.  Here is Kaplan’s eulogy:

By Marjory Kaplan

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Good afternoon.  Marshall (Gail’s husband), Rebecca (her daughter), family and friends.  In the midst of all our sorrow today, I’m going to share with you the story of our dear friend and colleague from the perspective of her work in the Jewish community.  Marshall has asked me to tell you about Gail’s journey – how over the years she came to become one of the most respected Jewish professionals not only in San Diego, but in the entire country.

My name is Marjory Kaplan, the CEO of the Jewish Community Foundation where Gail was an integral part of our wonderful team for over 12 years.

So let’s begin our story.  I first met Gail about 1998.  The Foundation was running the Community Youth Foundation for young teens to learn about giving.  As I remember, Gail just appeared one Sunday at one of the sessions.  I think she was scoping out the program for Rebecca.  And I also thought she was genuinely interested as she was then working as the part-time director of Adult Education at the Agency for Jewish Education. She worked for the AJE for about six years and administered outstanding programs for both teens and adults. 

Gail quickly became involved as one of the volunteers at the Community Youth Foundation – driving the students to site visits and working with them to decide how they would distribute their precious funds.  Her background as a Jewish educator at this congregation proved invaluable.
The very next year, Gail became the Director of the Community Youth Foundation.  That was 1999.

Gail was just terrific with the students.  They felt her respect and understanding.  They learned about tzedakah, and they became passionate about the community organizations they funded.  The program became a national model, and Gail created a manual that’s been used by at least 20 communities across North America.  Because of Gail, hundreds of young people in San Diego and beyond have learned the value of giving.
The next year, Gail’s responsibilities at the Jewish Community Foundation expanded considerably.  She began to help organizations and synagogues build their future endowments through legacy giving.  It was a great fit for Gail. 

Around that time, the Foundation began the Book of Life program. Gail organized the beautiful signing ceremonies around the county.  She helped scores of people write their heartfelt statements about why they were leaving a legacy to the Jewish community.
We brought the Book of Life here today and you’ll be able to read the Littman Family statement.

And then came ELI.  The Endowment Leadership Institute – fondly known as ELI – was born in 2003 when many of us at the Foundation felt stuck.  We were working with the community on teaching bequests and other planned giving techniques and it was just too technical, too dry. One day, Gail and I were meeting with our colleague Merle Brodie, and we said, how can we make this more exciting?  Let’s give grants to the organizations and synagogues when they meet their goals for new bequests.

Gail and I immediately got to work designing the program and spent a full year in careful planning and consulting with our board and our friends at the Rose Community Foundation in Denver.  By the spring of 2004, we launched the Endowment Leadership Institute.

In a very short time, there was a real buzz about ELI.  We had captured the attention of the community and we were all having fun – learning about the principles of bequest building from the country’s top consultants, achieving goals, and celebrating our success.  In the first 6 years of ELI, 20 Jewish organizations, schools and synagogues of all denominations – each with a team of professionals and volunteers – were participating.  Gail loved to say that we had created dozens of new development officers in the community.

Gail was especially proud of the sense of collaboration and the energy at the ELI sessions where we often had perfect attendance.  One of Gail’s favorite jobs was to pass out Starbucks gift cards to the ELI teams that were doing especially well.

Throughout the years of ELI, Gail was our fearless leader.  She was supremely well organized. She created outstanding training sessions, coached professionals and volunteers and proudly called herself the friendly nudge when organizations needed that extra push.  She formed great partnerships with our lay leaders, especially Jane Scher who was the founding ELI chair. Together, Jane and Gail were an irresistible team who passed along the wisdom that it’s only through trusting relationships that organizations can be successful in building their endowments.
Rabbi Simcha Weiser from Soille Hebrew Day, who’s in Israel right now, sent me this perfect description of Gail:  “Gail’s voice in the community was always clear, calm, drawn from our highest principles, and reflected a depth of community spirit.”

Over the past few days in the shock of losing Gail, I’ve been asking myself, what were her dreams for our community?  I remember one dream in particular.  Just two days before she passed away, Gail was sitting in my office.  We were looking at the Hanukah ad in the San Diego Jewish Journal where 923 names were proudly listed as part of the Create a Jewish Legacy program.  The listing was now 4 pages long.  In fact, Gail loved to scotch tape the pages together and hold them up – like this – at board and other meetings.  Someday, she would say, my dream is to have the entire Jewish Journal dedicated to the thousands of people who are leaving bequests for the San Diego Jewish community.  Just before Gail passed away, we had reached our first thousand.

A second dream she often described related to the Governance Leadership Institute, the second program that Gail led in the community.  That dream – she would say with a smile – was to have a long waiting list for boards throughout the Jewish community.  In other words, it would be so rewarding and so much fun to serve on a community or synagogue board that people would just simply line up.

The Governance Leadership Institute was a natural platform for Gail.  She loved and understood governance and knew the incredibly important link between strong governance and the ability to attract bequests and endowments.

Gradually, Gail rose to be on the senior management team at the Jewish Community Foundation with Charlene Seidle, Jeremy Pearl and myself.  She earned the title of Director of Endowments and then Vice President. 

While Gail was working hard at making ELI a success locally, it didn’t go unnoticed on the national scene.  She was constantly being asked to fly to other communities to share our success.  At a national legacy conference that Gail chaired a few years ago, every single presentation and every single one of the 30 communities there talked about the San Diego program and Gail Littman.

As Gail’s national reputation grew, a coalition of philanthropists from back East approached us – Michael Steinhardt, Harold Grinspoon and others were looking for the next great idea in the Jewish world.  They asked the Jewish Community Foundation with Gail in the lead to implement an ELI program for 5 communities around the country.  So three years ago, the Create a Jewish Legacy program began in San Francisco, St. Louis, Tucson, Philadelphia and with the national Hillel movement.  The results were astounding.  By the first year, the return on investment was already enormous.  

Then last spring, Harold Grinspoon, the founder of PJ Library and a major supporter of Jewish camping, flew out to present Gail and me with a bold idea:  he was willing to invest in a national ELI program for 49 communities.  Our San Diego Endowment Leadership Institute would become the national norm.   The Grinspoon Foundation Life and Legacy program was just being formed this fall. Gail’s partner at the Harold Grinspoon Foundation, Sue Kline, is here today with her husband Ed from western Massachusetts. Sue tells me that Harold couldn’t believe he was lucky enough to have Gail helping his Foundation spread the program far and wide. 

While Gail was working with the Grinspoon Foundation, back home in San Diego, she continued to direct our ELI program.  She also continued her role as a powerful mentor for our staff and the community.  Even with her ever-expanding responsibilities, she always wanted to be involved in the youth philanthropy programs.  Just two Sundays ago, she helped run the selection committee for the Peter Chortek Leadership Award for high school students.  She had great faith in our young people and knew that leaving financial bequests wasn’t enough – we also needed to develop the next generation of leaders to run our beloved organizations and synagogues.

We often hear people say, “No one is indispensable. Everyone can be replaced.”  Well it’s perfectly clear to me that Gail Littman is simply not replaceable. She had that absolutely magical combination of common sense, vision, discipline, wisdom, creativity and joy. 

If we want to honor Gail, then this is our challenge.  We must make her dreams a reality – we must ensure that our community – that every Jewish community – is healthy, highly functional, multi-generational, well-organized and well-funded.  Building great communities. That’s what Gail Littman’s service was all about. 

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Kaplan is CEO of the Jewish Community Foundation