24 | MAY 25 • 2023 

OUR COMMUNITY

J

ason Charnas, director of 
business and career services at 
Gesher Human Services, helps 
people looking for employment. With 
COVID hitting nonprofits 
hard, it’s been important to 
rehire and refill positions 
to keep quality programs 
running, he says. He’s been 
getting lots of calls from 
agencies looking for people 
to fill positions. 
That’s where The Collective comes 
in. It’s a project formed by the Jewish 
Community Center of Metropolitan 
Detroit’s CEO Brian Siegel and Sarah 
Allyn, JCC assistant 
executive director of 
strategic development, 
with Rabbi Ari Witkin, 
Federation director of 
strategy and philanthropic 
impact. 
Founded out of a 
conversation with the 
William Davidson 
Foundation about bringing 
stakeholders in the Jewish 
education and engagement 
system together, the two-

year-old initiative’s been 
working to centralize job 
searches along with having 
a focus on resource sharing 
and bolstering collaboration 
among Jewish organizations. 
At present, The Collective 
facilitates a youth profess-
ionals network that meets monthly and 
an early childhood providers group. 
It also has a series of other working 
groups, where professionals address 
issues affecting their industries today. 
For example, the staffing group, 
made up largely of human resources 
and hiring managers, led to the 
establishment of a Jlive job board (jlive.
app/detroitjobs), where all of the open 
positions across the Jewish community 
in Metro Detroit can be listed in one 
place. Other groups, called communities 
of practice, include ones focused on 
teen/tween professionals, day school 
heads, mental health 
professionals, congregational 
education directors and 
young adult engagement 
professionals. 
In tandem with 
the beginning of The 

Collective’s more formal work, The 
JCC’s Katie Vieder spent last summer 
visiting some 65 Jewish agencies to see 
what they needed. She built out a list of 
over 500 professionals in Metro Detroit 
who work in the Jewish community, 
some 200 of whom currently receive a 
monthly newsletter from The Collective. 
“Their voices are all really important 
in different conversations,” she says of 
the broad group of professionals they 
have the potential to reach.
The Collective emerges against a 
backdrop of increasing pressure on 
providers of Jewish education and 
engagement to boost their impact with 
the dollars invested in their institutions, 
explains the JCC’s Siegel. It’s based 
on the idea of collective impact and 
seeks to unite stakeholders that might 
otherwise be siloed. It uses subgroup 
learning, thought leadership, mapping 
and evaluation, and an annual cycle of 
programs and activities to provide new 
opportunities built out of networking 
and stronger relationships across 
agencies, he says. 
Similar strategies for solving adaptive 
challenges — ones where the problem 
is unknown, hard to identify and 

The Collective, a program between the JCC and Federation, is working 
to connect local Jewish agencies and help them work smarter.
Connecting the Community

continued on page 26

Jason 
Charnas

Sarah Allyn

Brian 
Siegel 

Rabbi Ari 
Witkin

Katie 
Vieder 

KAREN SCHWARTZ CONTRIBUTING WRITER

Sarah Allyn, Brian Siegel, Aaron Henne and Rabbi Ari Witkin. Group members convene to discuss ways to work together. 

