The two men and the two communities they serve are miles apart, but they share the same mission: to strengthen Jewish life in their communities, the nation and around the world. The jazz musician and the marathoner are leaders of Arizona’s two largest Jewish communities – one in a city generally known as liberal and the other considered more conservative.
Stuart Mellan, who plays a jazz gig most Saturday evenings after Shabbat, has been president and CEO of the Jewish Federation of Southern Arizona for 19 years. Stuart Wachs, an avid runner who enjoys competing in marathons, has been the president and CEO of the Jewish Community Association of Greater Phoenix ever since the local Jewish federation and Jewish community center decided to unite under one administrative structure nearly three years ago.
The two communities share a characteristic that gives them both an advantage and disadvantage over other Jewish communities in America – population growth. From 1980 to 2000, Arizona was the fastest growing state in the union, growing by 584% according to U.S. Census data. Phoenix and Tucson are the largest cities in the state with over 4 million in “The Valley,” and 1 million in the greater Tucson area. The Jewish population has increased similarly. Both leaders say the preponderance of newcomers creates both a welcoming community and the foundation for expanding both programming and the donor base. Successfully engaging these newcomers can create strong communities for all.
The downside is that many who move to Arizona are not affiliating with the organized Jewish community. Additionally, the two communities do not have the generations-deep reservoir of donors and community leaders. “Usually you don’t have multiple generations involved in a place like Tucson,” says Mellan. “It’s just starting to happen here.” An exception to this is Tucson Mayor Jonathan Rothschild, whose 87-year-old father now sits on the federation board and whose son has joined the young men’s leadership group. Rothschild himself will be leading a Tucson mission to Israel next summer.
Wachs is excited by the potential of Phoenix’s swelling Jewish population. “We have the beautiful weather and great lifestyle to draw people here. If we all can come together as a community, the community can prosper and be a vibrant Jewish community.” Phoenix and Tucson share the challenge of Jewish communities across the country.
“I think everybody understands that engagement in Jewish life is the overreaching issue we are all trying to find success in,” says Mellan. Initial engagement can help bring people further into the community. “Unless you connect and engage, it’s hard to understand the extraordinary work we do.” While the newcomers are new to Arizona, they are not new to Jewish life. They arrive with Jewish values intact. Wachs says the local community can capitalize on those past connections.
“Jewish values and culture are major motivators for people to secure the future for others,” says Wachs. Reminiscent of the classic tale of the old man planting carob trees that won’t bear fruit in his lifetime but will feed his children, Wachs adds, “I think so many of us feel the obligation to future generations as those before us did for us.” Both leaders have their own professional and life journeys that inform their work.
When Stuart Mellan came to Tucson to assume leadership of the JFSA in September 1995, it was his first experience west of the East Coast. He had spent his adult professional life moving between Jewish communal work in Allentown, PA, and Baltimore, MD. Both he and his wife, Nancy, had lost their first spouses to cancer at a young age. Between them, they had five children ages 4-10 when they married in 1993. Nancy, who was originally from Phoenix and loved the desert, “had a vision we should start our life in a new place,” says Mellan. When they met Mellan’s predecessor at a conference a year into their marriage, Nancy told him “keep the seat warm.” A year later the Tucson federation called and the family relocated and enrolled three of their children at Tucson Hebrew Academy. The family has been involved in two congregations: Anshei Israel and Or Chadash.
“We had six simchas in seven years (a wedding and six b’nai mitzvah),” says Mellan. Three of the five now adult children ( Jamie, Michah married to Laura, Eric, Jonah and Suki married to Dimitri) and two grandchildren (Sidney and Henson) live in Tucson; one lives in Los Angeles and one in Athens, GA.
“Because both of us were widowed young, we had an understanding about grief in different ways than many people,” says Mellan. “We learned grief for kids sometimes comes at the age when they can address it. For example, Suki was 5 weeks old when she lost her birth dad, so she worked through her grief as an adolescent.” While acknowledging that he can’t apply the grieving experience programmatically, Mellan says, “Part of our lives is loss and that has enabled Nancy and me to be there for people.”
He says he finds it energizing to be part of a community of newcomers. “A community built around new arrivals contributes to a welcoming community.”
Jewish communal work has been his focus since college. He earned a master’s in social work and was a teen worker at the JCC. Between Allentown and Baltimore he also served as a federation assistant director, campaign director and executive director. “Working at the JCC helped me to understand how the federation role is sometimes perceived by the agencies and how important it is to create strong partnerships with agencies.” A new framework created last year expands that partnership.
The Jewish Community Roundtable includes eight synagogues, five beneficiary agencies, the foundation and the federation. The federation is the convener with one agency chair and the chair of the Board of Rabbis serving as co-chairs of the roundtable. “We’ve created a paradigm where everybody feels like a partner,” says Mellan. “Aside from the tone being very positive, we had a couple of projects:” a new community concierge and affiliated community website and a new teen council. The community concierge will be housed at the JCC, an employee of the federation and paid by federation and foundation, with oversight provided by a committee of synagogue and agency leadership.
Mellan says the federation had attempted to expand its website to be a community website, but as of Nov. 1, the federation will revert to its own website. The community website, jewishtucson. org, will be redesigned as the roundtable’s community project with a downloadable phone app so people can find out what’s happening in the community with one click. “We’re trying to marry it to the concierge program,” Mellan explains. “Sometimes people need help connecting and finding a way into community.”
For those not as motivated to join the community, Mellan says programming needs to reach them in areas they are already interested in. For instance, a commercial real estate group each month attracts about 80 people, many of whom are not highly connected with the Jewish community. For the past 10 years, the federation has had an LGBT inclusion project that helps some people connect. Social action projects, such as the federation’s adoption six years ago of a school in a high-poverty area, “draws in people who like the idea that the Jewish community is not centered just on ourselves but also on the community we live in.” That project provides volunteer tutors, a volunteer counselor, school spirit T-shirts to every student, daily snacks to every kindergartner and weekend food packs to 65 students identified by the school.
Mellan says the roundtable and its projects grew out of insight gained during a strategic planning process that “No one organization can build Jewish community. We all need to be engaged.” It seems to be working. During his first 18 years at the helm, Mellan saw the annual campaign double and women’s philanthropy increase substantially. About six years ago, the federation implemented a young men’s leadership program to complement the young women’s leadership program that has been a strong presence in the community for nearly 30 years.
For Stuart Wachs, Jewish communal work was beshert (meant to be). Like many teens of his era, Wachs says he drifted away from Jewish involvement after his bar mitzvah. In college that drift continued. While earning a degree in business and recreation management, he says he had few Jewish friends. As a fitness buff and muscle-bound young coach in college, he was offered a job as a bodyguard for band Aerosmith. “I toured with them for eight months. It was an experience!” After graduation he was offered a job at the Cleveland Clinic, but it wasn’t due to start for a few months. He accepted what he expected to be a temporary job at the JCC in Cleveland.
Magically, he says, while in that Jewish-infused environment things slowly started to shift. Though he had thought his interest in Jewish life had been extinguished, a small pilot light inside him was just waiting for a spark to reignite. “I was making new Jewish friends and fuel started spraying on my pilot light. It made me more passionate,” he says. “Then I met my wife and that passion grew and grew.”
“That is why I am so passionate about organized Jewish community,” he says, noting that community rekindled his passion for Jewish life. “A lot of people go in the direction I did. With a strong organized Jewish community, people have the opportunity to reconnect.” Wachs and his wife, Janette, have two children, Jonah, 11, and Leah, 14, who celebrated her bat mitzvah last year in Israel. Though the family belongs to a congregation, Wachs says, “We enjoy going to a number of congregations to experience the diversity we have in this community.”
He arrived in Phoenix at a time when the federation was re-inventing itself. Despite a growing number of Jews, the federation campaign had been shrinking. Wachs arrived to become the first president and CEO of the new Jewish Community Association of Greater Phoenix – a merger of the Jewish Federation of Greater Phoenix and the Valley of the Sun JCC. Wachs emphasizes, however, both organizations still exist within the shared framework. “The JCA works well … with synergy of purpose, streamlined leadership and shared back office staff.”
“We are two organizations recreating ourselves with a spirit of openness and transparency,” says Wachs. “We’ve worked really hard to shift the organizational culture … to a relationship- based culture.”
The creative-thinking, innovative, purpose-driven culture on the federation side has increased trust, while on the JCC side it has improved service delivery, he says.
“We are starting to see increased membership,” he says, noting that participation in the JCC summer camps was up this year. He attributes the shift in part to a model of investment that has enabled the center to increase and improve programs and services. “We reached out to six generous donors, who gave $600,000 to invest in a capacity-building initiative,” Wachs says of the drive to enhance JCC offerings. “We are developing strategies and being fluid.”
He says the hard work to enable the relocation of Pardes Jewish Day School to the Ina Levine Jewish Community campus, which already houses the JCC and federation, has already reaped benefits. “There is a beautiful synergy of a day school and JCC on the same campus,” Wachs says.” We see great opportunity for Pardes and the JCC.” He notes that expanded after-school and camp programs to meet the needs of the new population on campus has just begun and a lot more can happen to enhance the vitality of the campus with the new synergy.
“The next evolution is a funding model … that recognizes there are so many needs locally that we can’t fund everything that touches Jews,” Wachs says. “We want to continue to fund core services and core impact areas. Looking at the PEW study, we selected three areas for core strategic impact.”Those areas are:
• Senior services: especially those that support aging in place, which is a “better economic model and better for quality of life.”
• Now generation, 30- to 35-year-olds: How can we as a community broaden engagement of the Now generation. “We see them as our future.”
• Israel Advocacy: Raising the Jewish community voice with clarity of information, with an emphasis on college campuses.
“We narrow the dollars we spend in these areas to really move the needle, while continuing to fund the overall fabric of the community,” says Wachs. “We never stopped being a federation … we are still part of JFNA ( Jewish Federations of North America), and we fund the core of the community. …We have growth, so we think we can fund core areas and also have specific focus areas.”
The federation side of the JCA functions as a convener, innovator, leader and resource for Jewish needs, he says. In the past 15 years, Phoenix went from being a small Jewish community to being a big community with a large percentage of first-generation Arizonans. Wachs says that the federation had not spent enough time building relationships, so giving fell substantially during the last recession. “As we’ve rebuilt, it’s (about) relevancy – we are seeing donors increase gifts and the return of donors.”The increasing confidence in the federation and the growth of the community resulted in a $450,000 increase in this year’s campaign. Another indication of the increased engagement of the local community was the rise in giving to this year’s Stop the Sirens campaign to aid Israelis during the recent conflict with Gaza.
The campaign raised more than $160,000, an increase of more than $100,000 compared to the last Israel Emergency Campaign two years ago. “A significant number of givers were not traditional federation givers,” says Wachs. “This is an opportunity to build relationships. We have people we can reach out to with information about our Israel Center … it’s a stepping stone to building a more engaged community.” Wachs believes that the larger population and increased engagement promise a vibrant future for Jewish Phoenix. “My passion as CEO and the board’s passion is genuinely to build a vibrant Jewish community,” says Wachs. “Not every decision will be right, but all are guided by that passion.”
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Arizona is fortunate to have two men so passionate and dedicated to the future of Jewish life in their respective communities and around the globe. With so much passion combined with the state’s population growth, the future looks bright for Arizona’s Jewish community.
Hows and Whys of Involvement –
WHY GET INVOLVED Stuart Mellan:
“we each can play a role in ‘co-creating’ our community; to help assure that it’s the kind of community we want for ourselves and our loved ones.” “Taking care of the vulnerable members of our community, both locally and globally – is a responsibility that we can only accomplish together.” Stuart Wachs: “it feels great! Being part of building a vibrant Jewish community is fulfilling. whether volunteering, making donations, attending events or programs you realize you can be part of something much bigger than any of us individually. (it) can be one of the most rewarding experiences in one’s life.” “To ensure a vibrant and supportive Jewish community for future generations. for so many people making sure that their kids, grandkids and future generations have the freedoms to be Jewish, the opportunities to travel their Jewish journeys, live in a supportive Jewish community and ensure that there are services and programs for Jews in need for generations to come is strong motivation to get involved.”
HOW TO GET INVOLVED Tucson: Connect with Community Concierge Ori Parnaby at concierge@ jewishtucson.org or 520-299-3000, ext. 241. as of Nov. 1, jewishtucson.org will include a link for volunteer opportunities and a concierge chat link to live chat with Ori when she is available. Phoenix: Click on “get involved” at jewishphoenix.org for ways to connect with the Israel Center, Women’s Philanthropy and Young Jewish Phoenix. To volunteer for the JCA or JCC, call 480-634-4900 and speak to Sara; she will connect you with appropriate person for your area of interest.
