12 | JANUARY 6 • 2022 

OUR COMMUNITY

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more accessible to everyone, in good 
times and bad.
“I have teens, and they’re going 
through a really bad week right now. 
The fact that there’s something for me 
to log onto to get help, and that our 
community even creates such events, 
is amazing,” she said. (Yaker was 
interviewed the week of the Oxford High 
School shooting, to which JFS, We Need to 
Talk and the Jewish Community Center’s 
JTeen team, among others, responded with 
emergency outreach programming.) 
“And then the fact that there’s a 
place now where people can go to 
find it. You don’t have to know who’s 
hosting what.”
We talked with Yaker at Federation 
headquarters to learn more about 
Jlive, as well as her journey in the 
Jewish community and how she, in her 
own hamish way, epitomizes the start-
up mentality. Here are her thoughts:

“I LIKE CHANGE”
I thrive on reinventing my career. I’ve 
worked at a PR agency downtown. 
Then I completed a 12-month master’s 
program at Michigan, student-
taught in Detroit and worked as an 
elementary teacher in Bloomfield 
Hills. It was so enriching. I stopped 
when my daughter Alexandra was 
born. 

In 2006, when my dad 
passed away, Hebrew Free 
Loan asked me if I wanted to 
take his spot on the board. 
I thought, “This is a way to 
honor his values — he just 
believed in giving back.”
I really got involved with 
Federation because I was invited 
to go on the Grosfeld Leadership 
Program. Then — it was actually in 
this building — I heard Judy Loebl 
speaking about a new program they 
were thinking about starting here for 
new parents. I went up to Jeff Lasday 
and I said, “I am the person you are 
going to hire for this program.” And 
I ended up getting the job as the first 
director of JBaby Detroit.
I did that for a couple of years. I 
worked with the team at Federation, 
and we created the structure, the 
classes, the logo, the name, the whole 
thing. I loved it. But then, you know, 
along the way, I’d been having people 
ask me to help them plan their events, 
and I’d always wanted to have my own 
company. So I opened EyeCatcher 
Events. I plan corporate, now mostly 
nonprofit, and bar and bat mitzvahs. 
I planned Israel@70 downtown and, 
this past October, I did JARC’s cool 
Rick Springfield fundraiser.
The event planning is still going 

on, but I’ve hit 
pause on taking new clients. Jlive has 
quickly become a full-time role. I still 
have plenty of events to keep me busy, 
but my three kids are getting older. 
My daughter Allie is in college, my 
son Noah is a senior in high school, 
and Levi is in eighth grade. I enjoy 
spending time with them on the 
weekends, especially if it’s a Michigan 
football weekend.

JLIVE … EVERYTHING 
ROLLED UP INTO ONE
In summer 2020, I was talking to 
some friends, Scott Kaufman, Brian 
Siegel, Ted Cohen and Robert Wolfe. 
They told me about their new project 
— Jlive. I thought, “OK, I don’t 
know what this is.” But I knew it had 
to do with events, with the Jewish 
community, and that — like Jbaby — 
there was an education component. So 
it seemed like everything (I had done) 
rolled up into one. 
So I started working on Jlive in 

LEFT: Visit Jlive at 
jlive.app 
BELOW: Young 
Adult programs 
featured on Jlive.
app