He has done an excellent job in the year since my resignation, and he is continuing through next year, too. At the community meeting, I stood up and made a short speech on the marvelous job he’s done. He cried.

I got back an email this evening:

I am so grateful for your unsolicited, gracious, and
heartfelt gratitude. Many people told me how much they
appreciated your remarks. You touched many souls tonight,
especially my wife, whose face was filled with grateful
tears.
Thank you for being the kind and sensitive soul that you
are. You stood very tall in our community tonight and
serve as a role model for others.

That was nice of him to do. 4 years ago

“The NPD person’s success in maintaining this illusion of competence and control to the outside world is perhaps the greatest source of pain for you if your are in a relationship with the narcissist. Whether you are the son, daughter, spouse, friend, or coworker, the underlying difficulties of the relationship are generally never seen by anyone else. This, in turn, causes you to continually doubt yourself since you rarely receive outside validation of what you are going through.”

The above is from page 15 of The Wizard of Oz and Other Narcissists: Coping with the One-Way Relationship in Work, Love, and Family. 5 years ago

I was really apprehensive about it, but it was OK. I got probably thirty hugs from people, including every member of the board, even Andrew. A couple of people asked me why I left, and I basically kept mum about it. 5 years ago

After this evening’s board meeting, my mind is made up: I will tender my letter of resignation tomorrow.

I was going to mark this then as “I give up”, but the reality is, I did a great job leading this board as president. It’s just that the leadership I have to offer is not acceptable to other significant members of the community. 5 years ago

I feel so depressed.

Working with the rabbi is the worst experience I have had on an interpersonal level with anyone in the last 20 years. 5 years ago

When I should have been working on the goal, Ride 200 miles in December, I made it through our Board Retreat.

Before I went to it, I thought I was going to hand in my letter of resignation. I did not.

I need so much courage, courage to continue. I need everyone to pray for me. I need to pray for myself. 5 years ago

The contract negotiations are pretty much done now; we just need to do a signing.

The budget, even with all cuts, is 20K short of being balanced. We are not doing a smoke-and-mirrors budget that pretends the budget will be balanced. The last time we did, “we’re raising everyone’s dues by 5%”, we had no buy-in, and some people revolted and paid less; very few actually paid the increase. It’s also deceptive to say we’re going to make up the difference in fund-raisers. The reality is – we get about $13K in fund-raisers annually, not $35K.

The alternatives to raising the dues: fire the office assistant; fire the rabbinic intern.

Another alternative, longer-term: get 40 more households in membership. 5 years ago

We’re cutting the rabbi’s salary back to his 2006 level. The rabbinic intern, despite increased responsibility and workload, will not get a raise. We will renegotiate our lease with the church for worship space. We will see if we can sublet our office space under our lease; if so, we will seal off the rabbi’s office and rent it out, and we’ll have to make do with the remaining space we have.

The Executive Committee made a pact; if we get too much tsurris for these decisions, we will resign in a body. I know they will be painful cuts, but we all need to be gracious and face the future together. Even with these cuts, we will barely balance the budget for the coming year. 5 years ago

Because I put time, energy, and worry into being board president, I am usually too tired to even want to go to religious services, much less actually go and get something out of them. 5 years ago

I came to the exalted position of board president through heading up the youth and family programing. The person who took my place is sadly incompetant. This became abundantly clear at HHD, where the children’s programing was at best disorganized. There was no one assigned to clean up at Rosh Hashana, so guess who did it. And then, even though she supposedly knew the whole thing was to go through until 7:00 PM, she took off at 2:00. I ended up being the adult in charge (except during the healing service and the concluding service), and guess who tidied up the toys and art supplies, vacuumed down the place, wiped down the tables, and cleaned up the kitchen after the break-fast dinner was over.

I was out by the dumpsters, and someone coming into the shul said, “Aren’t you the board president?!” I told her that taking out the trash was the epitome of being the board president.

We’ve got to recruit someone new to do family programming. We have lots of new members with kids – maybe I’ll host a potluck and we can have a conversation about how we’re going to work this in the coming year.

In my copious free time (CFT). 5 years ago

As I look over what I want to do in 5768…

I took a big piece of paper, and wrote at the top, “If I could do anything in the whole wide world” and then under that wrote a bunch of wishes. Then I drew circles around them, and made arrows between related goals.

One of those circles was to quit not only the presidency, but the board entirely. It not only got a circle around it, it got a pink highlighted square.

There were two main hubs, around which all the other circles seemed to connect. One hub was Reduce Stress and the other one was Make the Best Use of My Talents. Quitting the board seemed to be the way I could accomplish both.

I could be on a different board, and what I have to contribute, an expertise in the legal ways of nonprofits, an understanding of nonprofit finance, and a proven history of fundraising, could be appreciated. Instead, what has happened is that I am really UNappreciated in my current role at Bet Alef, and all I’ve gotten is tsurris for my efforts.

Feh. 5 years ago

I met with the rabbi yesterday at lunch. I said some of the things that the board has said amongst ourselves, but haven’t said to him. He was so angry at me he was shaking.

So, that was a barrel of monkeys and a half, uh huh.

Then I went to the Prep for High Holy Days class he held last night. As a part of that class, he gave a riff I’ve heard him give before about the pitfalls of the joys of righteous anger. Although he didn’t make eye contact with me when he did this riff, I felt like it was being addressed to me.

Then, after the class, I talked a little with the rabbinic intern. He said that he had a conversation like he has never had before with the rabbi that afternoon about how he feels about the rabbinic intern program, and how they can work together to get through this financial crisis and advance his training. The intern kept on saying, “this is huge, this is HUGE”, about how important it was to him. He also asked several times, “what is it that you talked about with Rabbi?” I mumbled some generalities, as I really do think it was between me and him.

This all makes me feel much better than I did 24 hours ago about our upcoming finance committee meeting today. 5 years ago

From the board treasurer, this morning:

Call me today please at 206-XXX-XXXX. I went over the cash records today and we are in much worse shape than I thought. We may be out of money by next month. 5 years ago

The rabbi seems to have zero trust in the rest of the staff. This is not a good situation. If there’s anything I hate, it’s dealing with the continual soap opera of trauma in the office. And I hate to say it, but it’s basically the rabbi’s fault. Part of the problem is that he identifies so strongly with the organization that he is a total control freak. The one person who could deal with him, Rachel, has left, and now he feels that there is no one he can rely on. I can understand why he feels the way he does, but at the same time, I don’t think we can fire the rest of the staff, as I think he wishes we would do.

I wish I could be a normal board president, and just set policy and direction, and raise money. 5 years ago

There’s a crazy lady who lives in low-income housing in the vicinity of our offices. It used to be that she’d just come by and hang out at the office, read the books, and bother the staff with conversation.

After our most recent office manager left, and the new one came in, she didn’t have as much patience with the crazy lady. As she did more and more to try to get her to leave, the crazy lady started acting increasingly hostile and crazy.

Things escalated. The crazy lady starting issuing threats, in both anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim (!) in character. Our office manager got increasingly frightened. After all, less than a year ago a crazy man shot up the Jewish Federation here and killed several people. Now there’s a restraining order against the crazy lady. She supposedly can’t come any where near the building. But you know she’s going to.

I’m supposed do something about this now, and I have no time, no mental space, no skills in this area. Out of compassion, I don’t think the crazy lady should be arrested – I don’t think that is going to help her. We need to find the crazy lady’s case worker – she surely has one. We need someone who can make the situation less volatile, who can intervene.

But I’m not going to be doing any of this. I’m leaving for Japan in the morning. 5 years ago

Well, that’s the way I’m feeling about it. It’s like watching sausage being made – you really didn’t want to know how your religious organization was run, did you? The problem is, we’re all human beings. I wish we weren’t. I wish our rabbi was perfect, and that we were all filled with godliness in our interactions with each other.

This is where I’m at with this one in the long haul: I’m going to stick it out my two year term. By that time, my daughter will be Bat Mitzvah, and I will have fulfilled my commitment. But I will completely re-evaluate my relationship to this community at that time, and see where I’m going to continue my spiritual path. 6 years ago

On Saturday, I led our board through an all-day retreat to create our five year plan. We didn’t do all that I had hoped, but we at least have the basics of a 5 year plan, and a road map for the rest of the calendar year. 6 years ago

Some issues have come up. I don’t feel like I should go on about them here, because this is a public spot, and I need a private space for some feedback and guidance.

I desperately need a support group for congregational presidents. Our organization is unaffiliated, so there is not like a email list for presidents of related congregations I can join.

Our previous president is not going to be helpful in this situation, either.

Any help, ideas greatly appreciated. 6 years ago

To have the board develop a 5 year strategic plan. I want to have a matrix:

Overall goal at the top
Then, four columns headed as follows:

Objective
Steps to achieve objective
Deliverable (Quality/Quantity identified)
Date due

No? 6 years ago

Here’s the deal. The entirety of my professional life has been in or around nonprofit organizations. I’ve been working in the specific area of nonprofit finance now for about 16 years. I feel knowledgeable about nonprofit governance financial management.

My groovy shul is filled with right-brained people. The joke is that you belong to Bet Alef if you’re a healer, a therapist, or an artist. We only have one CPA in the congregation (a synagogue with only one CPA!!), and she’s stepping down as Treasurer. I’ve served on the board for over a year already, because I’ve been heading up family programming (“L’Dor Va Dor”). The orginal deal was that I would step down from chairing L’Dor Va Dor (yay! The job hasn’t been what I had hoped), and take over as Treasurer.

However, it turns out that Jacquie, who is our current VP, did not feel up to stepping up to be president yet. And our current president, Carol, has been there really only as a stop-gap when our previous president, Steven, left for Switzerland in the middle of his term. So they were casting about for a board president.

I said I’d do the President job, but then we’d have to find someone else to be Treasurer. Boy, that’s going to be a challenge, but I guess the thought is, it’s going to be easier to find a Treasurer than a President.

The job starts with the new secular year, 2007. And here’s my QQT for this goal:

For my term as board president, it is my goal to bring the Bet Alef board up to basic standards for 501©(3) governance, to wit:

1. Revise the by-laws, and the Articles of Incorporation, if necessary, so that the official governing documents of the organization reflect its current policy and practice. And then have these submitted to, and approved by, the IRS.

2. Have an annual review of the rabbi. Currently, everyone is too afraid to do this. I think this is no good for us, and no good for the rabbi.

3. Do a salary survey for the rabbi, and document that we are not paying him more than is standard for his position.

4. Write a conflict of interest policy. We could not get IRS nonprofit approval today without one. Consider incorporating it, or portions of it, into our by-laws.

5. Be conscious of Unrelated Business Income Tax. It isn’t that we shouldn’t pursue revenue that incurs UBIT, it’s that we should be aware of it as an issue.

6. The performance and management tools and benchmarks I wanted to have in place as Treasurer—I will give these to our new Treasurer, and ask that we see them as a part of our Treasurer’s report.

Because we haven’t done 1 – 5 on the list above, I am afraid that if we were audited by the IRS, we would be in hot, hot water. It isn’t that we aren’t honestly trying to meet our mission, or that anyone is committing fraud. It isn’t like our rabbi is making gobs of money like some corrupt televangelist. Rather, because we’re all such groovy right-brained people, no one is making sure we’re meeting standards and documenting our practices.

So, this is my goal: that by the end of my term as President, I will ensure that Bet Alef meets the basic requirements of nonprofit governance that apply to all 501©(3) tax-exempt charitable organizations. Even better, that Bet Alef meets not just the basic requirements, but meets the non-required standards of good governance and best practices, in its general and financial management. 6 years ago