Yiddish Book Center
Director of Endowment and Planned Giving

The Yiddish Book Center seeks a Director of Endowment and Planned Giving to join a dynamic cultural organization and to play a lead role in its fundraising program. The Center is a 31 year-old nonprofit dedicated to celebrating modern Jewish and Yiddish culture by rescuing endangered Yiddish books and opening them to new generations through education and visitor programs. Housed in an architecturally distinctive building adjacent to the campus of Hampshire College in Amherst, MA, the Center offers an intellectually stimulating, reflective, and creative environment where you can greatly enrich your life and your career.

The Director of Endowment and Planned Giving will partner with the President, Executive Director, and Director of Development to develop and execute a plan to significantly increase the Center’s endowment. The Center has identified great untapped potential deferred giving potential among its current donor pool and has created this new role to lead the strategy and implementation of a formal planned giving program. The Director will be responsible for identifying, cultivating, soliciting and stewarding 5- and 6- figure gifts in support of expanding the endowment. A strong appreciation for and commitment to the Center’s mission, values and goals and a minimum of seven years’ planned giving experience are required.

About The Yiddish Book Center

The mission of the Yiddish Book Center is to rescue Yiddish books, introduce a great world of literature to new readers, enlarge understanding of Yiddish and Jewish culture and strengthen modern Jewish identity. Founded in 1980 by MacArthur Fellow Aaron Lansky, the Center, located in Amherst, MA, is currently supported by 20,000 donors, an active Board of Directors, 20 staff members, and a roster of committed volunteers.

The Center’s architecturally distinctive home, built in 1997 and expanded in 2008, is located in a former apple orchard adjacent to a college campus in Amherst, Massachusetts, and features theater and performance space, a busy student center, art galleries, open Yiddish book stacks, museum exhibitions, and other resources. Since its inception, the Center has recovered one million volumes of modern Yiddish literature, with hundreds of additional books continuing to arrive each week. In recent years the Book Center has created innovative educational offerings for college students and adults as well as a range of public programs and events. The Center’s achievement has been hailed as the “the greatest cultural rescue effort in Jewish history.”

The Yiddish Book Center’s work falls within three major categories:

Collection and Preservation: While the days of Aaron Lansky’s traversing the country in a truck to collect books are mostly over, the Center continues to receive thousands of additional volumes each year. Duplicates are made available for sale at nominal cost, both on site and online; others books are more rare and are cataloged and carefully preserved for historical and scholarly purposes. Through the auspices of the Righteous Persons Foundation, the Center digitized 11,000 volumes as the Steven Spielberg Digital Yiddish Library, and in 2009 placed the full texts of these volumes online via the Internet Archive. These books are accessible to users, free of charge, and are downloadable in their entirety from any computer. On- and off-site storage, archival process and equipment, media and technology are critical components of the collection and preservation process.

Education: The educational element of the Center is the focus of a recently announced strategic direction for the organization and represents a major shift in the organization’s primary mission. Currently, the Center supports the highly selective, seven-week Steiner Summer Internship Program for undergraduates and graduates in Yiddish language and Eastern European Jewish cultural history; a year-long fellowship program for college graduates, in which young people play a leadership role oral history, exhibition development, online Yiddish instruction, bibliography and other new and ongoing projects; and a college cultural fellows program where undergraduates initiate Yiddish programming on their own campuses. Formal education programs are hosted in the Kaplen Family Building, a new wing offering classrooms, research and study areas, common space, and offices. Note the focus on educating a young audience. This focus is a major emphasis for the Center’s future.

Visitor Programs: The Center hosts approximately 10,000 visitors a year through exhibitions, travelling programs, interpretive tours, and other special events. It offers monthly programs including films, lectures, concerts, readings, and a summer Yiddish arts festival. The Center also houses a kosher kitchen and beautiful indoor and outdoor space.

The Center is a fiscally sound organization. To provide a sense of the organization’s financial position and operational scale, the operating budget for FY2012 is just over $3.714 million, up from $3.254 million in 2011. The budget increase represents a strategic investment in education, which is increasingly central to the Center’s vision. Currently, budgeted revenue for the Center comes in the form of contributions and grants ($2M), membership ($1.2M), program fees ($100K), endowment income ($391K), and sales ($90K). The Center recently received a bequest of approximately $5 million – the largest in its history. The endowment presently stands at $16 million.

About the Position

The Yiddish Book Center seeks an experienced, strategic, and intellectually oriented Director of Endowment and Planned Giving. This new role has been created to address the untapped deferred giving potential of the Center’s current donor pool. Reporting to the Executive Director, she/he will work collaboratively with the Director of Development to create strategy, goals, and context for a formal planned giving program and a future endowment campaign within the overall development program. A senior member of the Center’s management team, the Director will play a key role in the next phase of organizational growth and fundraising accomplishments.

Specific responsibilities include:

• Design, implementation, and management of planned gifts program for the Center.
• Management of a portfolio of current deferred giving prospects and identification, cultivation, and solicitation of new prospects.
• Working collaboratively with Director of Development and membership department to identify and prioritize prospects.
• Strategically partnering with Founder, Executive Director, Director of Development and high level volunteers on cultivation and solicitation of top priority donors.
• Stewardship of gifts made through bequests, trusts, charitable gift annuities, and other planned giving vehicles.
• Planning of cultivation and educational events designed to increase awareness of deferred giving opportunities.
• Preparation of written materials, including articles, correspondence, marketing and solicitation vehicles to promote the concept of planned giving and the endowment campaign.
• Drafting of financial illustrations of deferred giving options and gift agreements for review by prospects, their families, and their advisors.
• Establishment of procedures for tracking and qualifying prospects and for recording and reporting gifts in partnership with Director of Development and Development Associate.

Qualities of the successful candidate include:

• Strong appreciation for the Yiddish Book Center’s mission, values and goals and ability to effectively communicate that mission to the Center’s multigenerational members.
• Appreciation of the full range of modern Jewish culture and ability to connect with donors on an intellectual level.
• Minimum 7 years fundraising experience with a track record of achievement in building endowments and executing planned giving programs.
• Demonstrated success identifying, cultivating, closing, and stewarding major/planned gifts at the 5- to 6- figure level.
• Expert knowledge of theories, concepts, and principals of planned giving.
• Experience developing marketing materials, communications, illustrations, and reports to promote planned giving.
• Demonstration of integrity, humor, a collaborative attitude, flexibility, a can-do approach, and creativity.
• Ability to work as part of a collaborative team.
• Excellent interpersonal and organizational skills.
• Excellent written and oral communication abilities.
• Highly organized, results-oriented, and focused.
• Self-motivated, with a capacity for challenging work.
• Demonstrated problem solving and strategy skills.
• Knowledge of Raiser’s Edge required.
• Ability to maintain a flexible work schedule, including some evenings and weekends and willingness to travel frequently.

Email cover letter and resume in confidence to:
YBC@developmentguild.com

Tracy Marshall
Senior Consultant
Development Guild/DDI

For more information on the Yiddish Book Center, please visit http://www.yiddishbookcenter.org/.