Present: Gil Landau, Rebecca Murow Klein, Josh Klein, Jon Apter, Stephan Kallus, Jessica Torch, Jeremy Kadden, Danny Alpert, Natalie Lascar, Rachel Bergstein, Adina Alpert
Jelly Belly’s top three flavors are licorice, buttered popcorn, and cherry.
Welcome to newest LC member, Natalie Lascar - Community Relations chair.
Two Minute Updates from LC Members -
JK (Chinuch)- Chinuch thinking about Tisha B’av. Want to infuse davening with speaker. No lunch and learn scheduled until fall.
JA (Treasurer)- Switching fiscal year to July/June to match collection period of dues. Will assume last years numbers will be repeated.
JK (Gabbai)- On time arrivals were good this past week, emailing people has helped, but more leadership presence would be helpful.
RB - Do we want to continue to push for on time minyan even if no one is in avelut?
JK - We do want to even then. Echoed by DA.
SK - would bribery help?
RMK - I would sponsor iced coffee
SK (Hospitality)- Mystery guest scheduled for late August. New Member initiative underway, led by Shira Broms, to have leadership host new members. Shira Kurtz has proposed a buddy program to link people that are new to DC with volunteer from DCM who is interested in grabbing coffee/froyo etc. Would like a soft opening in announcements, then use membership signup form to find more volunteers. Also working on another initiative to rebrand hospitality.
JA - Look to other Jewish organizations in DC for volunteers for the buddies program.
NL - Gather the Jews has a lot of programming like that
BT (Kids and Parents)- Very successful slate of kids programming on retreat. Tot shabbat bifurcated this past weekend. Successful for younger set, less so for older set. Beth criticized volunteer leader. (Herself) Some children were a little overactive without parents around. But much quieter without little kids. There has been wo inquiries into leading older kids tot shabbat long term. We should revisit with JCC to get the space consistently. Also successful playground meetup and another coming.
NL (Hospitality) - Met with Josh Wilkenfeld to discuss membership drive (see later conversation).
DA (SC)- Meeting with Elanit Jacobovics, President of the board of Kesher. She had reached out to us twice recently, first to discuss working together to work as a greater downtown community to support the upkeep of the eruv. As a result, DC Minyan donated funds and will continue to discuss future support. The second time she reached out to us was to discuss general inter-community programming and building cooperation among different downtown DC communities. It was a positive conversation about possible goals and potential obstacles.
MEMBERSHIP DRIVE
JT - We will be discussing pricing, family pricing,
JA - current price structure is $180 for low income, $270 for individual, $80 for associate, $50 for families with any amount of children. and $36 for alumni. $170 for all three days of High Holidays.
GL - The current budget is $13,000 in the red. (Without any grant money factored in). That does include spending on things that were in the budget because of the grant we received, but may not be if there was no grant
JA - Budget is very conservative in terms of how much income we get. So deficit is not necessarily as much as it seems. Do not think this is the year to worry about budget deficit and should not increase prices for that reason. Echoed by RB. and SK and NL
AA - I think there is a degree to which we limit ourselves by the budget (we could think bigger - both individual programming and long term investment). We are looking at more meetings, and that is something that could have a large impact on budget.
BT - Perhaps we should plan on having a larger conversation more in advance of budget setting and dues structure next year.
RMK - Envisions a long afternoon really thorough conversation about it, more than just an LC meeting.
JK - Would like that to be broader, not just LC.
JK - Could we use dues as an incentive to help spur growth of non-married and/or childless community.
RMK - I don’t think dues is our problem, insufficient programming geared toward that demographic might be the cause.
SK - Would love a representative of Friday night community at LC meetings.
RMK - Have suggestions for that at a later time.
Summary - Consensus to not determine dues as an effort to balance budget and not to raise dues.
KIDS PRICING-
GL - current kids payment is $50 per family with children (flat fee) but spending on families with kids is around $175 per family. We are considering switching to a per kid charge. Or a raise in flat free. Or charging more for babysitting on HH.
BT - Conversation about HH babysitting has been had many times. The babysitting is a service to everyone, not just parents with kids. Does not think we should charge for that. (Feels pretty strong)
Also feels that providing the children's programming we do is sort of the price of admission for every member to support in the community that we have. RB echoes.
RB - charging for babysitting disincentivizes parents actually using the service, which makes the experience worse for everyone. Also points out that it is very unusual for shuls to charge per kid.
NL - is a suggested donation for babysitting services doable?
JA - echoes about not charging per kid. Does feel that $50 per family is lower than the benefit received by each family. Also, we rarely have sponsorship for kids events.
BT - we could put together a list of sponsorship opportunities (community in general and children’s programming in specific)
AA - Echoes that most families with kids get far more than $50 benefit from community.
RB - the big unknown is will we hire someone for tot shabbat? If we do that, we can absolutely increase. But to increase for something we may not do seems wrong.
JA - even if we don’t hire a tot shabbat person, we can assume we will hire a babysitter instead which will cost some of that money.
AA - Suggests splitting a possible substantial increase into two smaller increases (one this year and one next year if we do spend more money.)
GL - Reiterates that charging per kid is not a good direction to head in. $50 is low, should increase this year. $75 is reasonable.
JK - disagrees about keeping the flat fee - we are not a traditional synagogue, why should we try to mimic them?
RB - This should be a part of a larger discussion about what we value as a community. There is an arbitrariness to our budget decisions.
JA - the charge per kid would have to be about $35 to bring in the same amount of money as $50 per family.
ASSOCIATE MEMBERSHIP
18 associate members this year. Paid per family. Does not receive membership benefits. Well, most of them. Intended for people whose primary community is not DC Minyan. Of those 18, approximately 10 are people who may sign up for full membership if there was no associate membership.
GL - We could make it clear that it is $90 per individual, not per family. And make it clearer that shavuot early registration is not included.
JA - people who sign up for associate are really members somewhere else.
JT - I still don’t understand the point of associate members.
JA - I think it gives people a way to show support for the community without being members.
NL - If it’s so few people, why take it away?
DA - It’s how we would want other communities to treat us.
JA - We could get rid of alumni membership. (Crowd approves)
JT - Shul Cloud will be here soon.
VOLUNTEERISM
JT - Volunteerism is low in some places - tot shabbat, kiddush. We want to incorporate volunteer signup into membership signup. Idea is to have very definite (and limited) list of choices to make. RB volunteers to be in charge of follow-through.
RB - Wants to discuss more broadly how to cultivate leadership. A problem we’ve had is follow through is difficult. Part of it is data problem. (Hopefully shulcloud will help with that). How will we distinguish between this and the broader “do you want to leyn...... ” section.
JT - we want this to be much more specific (perhaps choose a date on the spot.)
JA - Follow through should be automatic with shul cloud.
JK - Why do we need to have people that leyn a lot also volunteer for things like kiddush cleanup?
BT - maybe we just ask people to commit to one shabbat being “their shabbat” Come on time, setup, cleanup.
Also, we should make sure it is a per adult requirement, not per family.
DA - Do we want to have options for Friday night volunteering also? It could lead to more crossover between the two halves of the community.
BT - Important to remember that in a lay led community you do not pay your way out of volunteering.
Additional item -
RMK - What if we switched summer oneg to pre davening happy hour? It could lead to collecting better contact info.