Five years ago, our school went through an accreditation process that highlighted our need to stabilize fundraising and enrollment while engaging in strategic planning to reach key goals. As a prerequisite to achieving these goals, we needed to upgrade our school quality to “investment grade.” With a proud legacy of 65 years, it was time to build on past successes. Our approach emphasized being deeply rooted while becoming forward focused.
Upgrades
Rav Kook suggested contemporary Judaism needs to be like putting “fine aged wine in beautiful new flasks.” In more modern terms, this meant we had to improve both our steak and our sizzle. This required significant investments in personnel improvements and intensive curricular review. New educational upgrades were purchased, including technology designed to improve parent communication, teacher instruction and the collection of student learning data. Ongoing professional development by our local independent school association ensured research-based best practices informed our professional growth.
Our strategic compass included widespread adoption of data-driven teaching and learning for all staff and students, peer coaching, science of learning–based instruction and increased enrichment and remedial opportunities for students utilizing curriculum-based measures (CBM). This led to clearer goals to better market our school to potential local donors and families. Better quality of services helped us resonate with a broader array of families by showcasing program improvements and growth.
Outreach
Proactive outreach to retain existing families, attract newer families and identify potential candidates for our school increased via social media, amplifying our messaging to a broader array of constituents. Our ground game required us to stretch across silos to partner with a wider array of communal institutions such as the Jewish federation, local synagogues, the Holocaust museum and local preschools as well as PJ Library. We’ve aimed to forge synergistic collaboration with others that share even partial common goals.
The time is ripe to engage disconnected families to our nurturing Jewish institutions. This trend started after the Covid era and has increased as more people appreciate varied outposts of Jewish life.
Transformative Gifts
As a result of our institutional improvement efforts, our school, the Rudlin Torah Academy-Richmond Hebrew Day School, received gifts designed to support day school scholarships totaling over $3 million, $1 million from Marcus and Carole Weinstein and $2 million from Josh and Elly Goldberg. How did we achieve this accomplishment?
It started by building relationships. Our Parent Volunteer Association, headed by Elly Goldberg, runs a yearly Purim fundraiser providing food to others. A few years ago, RTA board member Rebecca Levy hand-delivered a mishloach manot basket to the Weinsteins, who were involved in philanthropy to causes like the JCC and the Holocaust Museum, but less so to day school.
This personal touch opened the door to building a relationship with the Weinstein family, who we learned are passionate about diversity in the school community. The Weinsteins began increasing targeted gifts to us over the past three years to interest areas such as broadening our student base and honoring Holocaust survivors.
Stakeholders saw increased coverage about RTA in the Reflector, our local federation newspaper. Articles about our school developments were communicated through press releases, advertisements, articles and images demonstrating the quality of our educational program.
Relationships
Building relationships takes time and can yield significant results. Our efforts brought more people into RTA’s orbit. Not every school visitor enrolls their children, but positive guest experiences tailored to individual interests with a compatible docent often turn strangers into stakeholders, allies, supporters and even ambassadors. These grassroots connections build relationships one person at a time.
Forging relationships expanded opportunities. For example, this year, local heads of federation beneficiary agencies were invited to attend a mission to Israel. I decided to attend this mission, despite it taking time away from school. In fact, my mission attendance along with other RTA board members and parents positively impacted our receiving even more significant communal support.
Investing in Jewish day schools is slowly becoming viewed as investing in a communal asset with long-term returns, instead of as purely a charitable endeavor. Donors give to organizations they trust, and if they see their friends involved, they are more likely to continue their giving due to that trust and reliability. Indeed, a local rabbi, Rabbi Dovid Asher, who is very supportive of our school was instrumental in helping to usher one of the recent major gifts, helping to bolster the donors’ confidence in us.
Lay Leaders
Influential lay leaders can advocate for the school’s mission and facilitate connections with potential donors as well as showing the community that the school is a community asset. This year, our lay leaders have also played critical roles in advancing the school’s mission. Steven Skaist, an RTA alumni parent and lay leader within the Richmond Jewish community, approached his close friends the Goldberg family, an existing donor family, to consolidate their giving into a “Jewish Futures Fund.” This fund would focus on our day school scholarship needs as well, and would also enhance other related initiatives in the greater Richmond Jewish community such as adult education and Israel advocacy programs.