Last night, the Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh held its final Board meeting for this term. We took the opportunity to look back at our accomplishments over the last two years. We are really proud to have launched our Jewish Community Security Director position and have been impressed with all that he has accomplished in such a short time. We implemented a process to look at new business models using an “out of the box” consultant, much like startups do. We’ve grown our annual campaign and our Foundation to record levels. Truly, we have so much to celebrate.

At the same time, we did not shy away from all those things we still need to work on as we move into the future. How will we respond to the results of the Community Study being conducted right now? How do we better engage Jewish young adults? How do we make our community more efficient? How do we ensure we have the very best human resources in both volunteer and staff members? And so many more questions.

It’s always good to celebrate what one has done, but the minute you only look at your accomplishments and not at how much more work there is to do, you lose your relevance. We are committed to pushing the Federation and our entire Jewish community towards our vision of a “thriving, vibrant and engaged Jewish community.”

Wishing you a Shabbat Shalom and looking forward to writing you next week with some thoughts from my time in Israel at the Jewish Agency for Israel Board of Governors meetings.