Women Fill Many More Top Management Positions
at JCCs
A quiet, and for some, long overdue, revolution
is going on in the administration of Jewish Community Centers.
In the last 15 years, the number of women executive directors
has gone from 6 percent to 26 percent in JCCs in the United
States and Canada. Within the last 18 months, 50 percent of
the new executive directors placed in JCCs have been women.
“There is no longer a glass ceiling,” said Alan
Mann, senior vice-president for JCC and community services
for JCC Association. “JCC board members are more and
more recognizing the abilities of women to lead agencies.”
According to Centering on Professionals; The 2001 Study of
JCC Personnel in North America published by the Florence G.
Heller-JCC Association Research Center, the increase in female
executive directors is part of a trend toward more women among
the ranks of JCC professionals. "This significant new
information coming from the Personnel Study underscores the
importance of research in the work and planning of JCCs,"
said Judith Lieberman, chair of the Research Center.
Even with the exclusion of early-childhood-education teachers
(overwhelmingly female), women currently make up 72 percent
of professionals in JCCs. Until recently, however, women were
not well represented at the most senior management levels.
That clearly has begun to change. “More women are interested,
and more women are getting the positions,” said Linda
Kislowicz, executive director at the YM-YWHA/ Montreal JCCs
for eight months. Kislowicz has been in Jewish communal service
for 30 years, most recently as director of Jewish Family Service
in Montreal, and she has been a witness to the change. She’s
not sure women had the skills and support they needed 15 years
ago to take on a senior management position. “It’s
a huge challenge,” she said. While she finds her current
JCC board cooperative, she is aware that few women serve as
board members. “We have a dearth of strong female leadership
on the lay side. It’s an area to be developed.”
Carol Kranitz, the new executive director of the JCC of South
Hampton Roads in Norfolk, Virginia, sees the change too. “Social
workers are not the only ones being considered for top management
positions now,” Kranitz said. “We’re looking
at JCCs more as a business. Skills, creativity, and vision
are more the guidelines for upper management than gender.”
Kranitz noted that a large portion of the people in her executive
training class with Steven Rod, JCC Association vice-president
for professional development services, were women, and she
believes that women bring special skills to the job. “Women
bring the ability to balance many more things at once than
men,” Kranitz said. “We were always expected to
do it, and now we’re bringing it into the workplace.”
###
JCC Association
is the leadership network of, and central agency for the Jewish
Community Center Movement, which is comprised of 350 JCC,
YM-YWHA and camp sites in the U. S. and Canada. JCC Association
offers a wide range of services and resources to strengthen
the capacity of its affiliates to provide educational, cultural,
social, Jewish identity-building, and recreational programs
to enhance the lives of North American Jews of all ages and
backgrounds. Additionally, the movement fosters and strengthens
connections between North American Jews and Israel as well
as with world Jewry. JCC Association is also the U.S. government
accredited agency for serving the religious and social needs
of Jewish military personnel, their families, and patients
in VA hospitals through JWB Jewish Chaplains Council.
Miriam
Rinn
Communications Manager
JCC Association
15 E. 26 St., NY, NY 10010
212-786-5092
fax: 212-481-4174
send an e-mail
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