Why Family Matters?
Ensuring that Jewish Family Service can continue to meet basic human needs, while retaining the flexibility to address emerging needs, is at the heart of the Family Matters Campaign. Gifts to the Campaign will enable JFS to:
Reduce and prevent suffering of our highest risk community members.
The costs of meeting the basic needs of individuals and families are growing exponentially. The JFS Polack Food Bank is feeding 48% more households today than just four years ago. A 62% jump in rental assistance dollars over the past three years has not been near enough to meet emergency housing needs. The JFS Family Matters Campaign will ensure that the neediest members of our community are safe, fed, clothed and sheltered.
Ensure sustainability and flexibility to meet evolving community needs.
We don't know what emergencies are on the horizon, or what new issues families and individuals might face. We do know, however, that the Family Matters Campaign will provide an operating reserve and build the endowment fund to give JFS the flexibility to respond to previously unmet and unimagined needs.
Provide dignified physical spaces to better serve clients' social and emotional needs.
Construction of a new 19,000 square foot building next to the current 13,000 square foot Jessie Danz Building (already owned by JFS) will centrally locate the majority of JFS programs on one convenient campus in the heart of Capitol Hill. This, in turn, will better meet the many needs of clients, program participants, staff and volunteers. An enormous boost to this endeavor was a half-million dollar stimulus grant from the Federal Government, awarded in 2009 to JFS through the City of Seattle, to renovate the JFS Polack Food Bank into a state-of-the-art facility consistent with today's "best practices".
Click Here to see the Case for Giving in PDF Format
"The torch has been passed to us. An opportunity to be involved in a Campaign of this magnitude with roots so deep and so firmly planted in our own backyard comes along literally once in a lifetime."
Donna Benaroya, Past President, JFS Board of Directors
