Welcome back everybody! A lot has been happening here at
JFS. I have begun work on an additional part of the Survivor needs assessment. I
have been working on our 2G outreach effort. I have created a new survey, a
flyer for advertising the town hall meeting, and a letter explaining who I am
and what the needs assessment is for so when children of survivors receive the
survey they aren’t wondering what is going on. Meanwhile, I have also made a
lot of progress on the first ever Metro-Detroit Survivor Newsletter. The idea
is that this will be a bi-annual newsletter that will keep the survivor
community informed about JFS services, as well as changes to indemnification as
well as new funds.
I taught myself InDesign software because that
is what our PR department uses and will allow them to take over the newsletter
after my year of service is complete. Once I had learned the software, I
created the template for the newsletter as well as all of the content for it. I
have been fortunate enough to receive feedback and support from both my
supervisors and the PR department, which has helped me fine-tune the newsletter.
I am hoping that within the next month I will have the newsletter completely
done and we can send it to the printer, develop the digital e-blast version,
and send it out to our entire mailing list. Hopefully this will get the word
out into the community about the services JFS offers, as well as keep survivors
up to date on the latest changes to indemnification, including several new
funds that quite a few in the community may be eligible for.
I am very excited to report that so far my outreach efforts
have been successful. I had to file my quarterly report to the federal
government and was able to report that because of my outreach, we have taken in
at least 40 new clients, which has led JFS to expand a part time (Russian
speaking) position into a full time position, and they have posted an
additional bi-lingual care manager. It
is exciting to get to see that what seems like small things when you are in the
daily minutia of planning, development, and implementation is actually having
an impact in my own community.
Beyond the newsletter, I have started a new phase of my time
here at JFS. I have begun the lengthy process of developing a multi-tiered Holocaust
history education program for the staff at JFS. There is a need at JFS to
educate all of the staff about the history of the Holocaust, and for those that
work with survivors to receive a more in-depth education on not just general
history of the Holocaust, but specifics about countries, camps, and important
events that survivors may have lived through and may still affect their daily
lives. I’m very excited that I get to use what I learned during my Master’s
Degree to help educate other people that understand the importance of Holocaust
education. I am also looking into expanding this curriculum once it is
developed to become a community education event for social workers and other
human services groups so they too can learn about what their clients might have
lived through, in order to provide more compassionate and understanding service
to an aging Survivor population.
I also had the opportunity to give a talk at my co-worker’s
church on Sunday in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. The social justice
group has a yearly event to commemorate MLK. I was asked to talk about myself,
my education and trip to Rwanda, and something related to MLK. I decided to
talk about the connections between the Holocaust, Jewish community, and the
Civil Rights movement. I spoke about my history, my education and Rwanda trip
(along with a little history of the genocide there), and then talked about this
seldom acknowledged connection between the Jewish community and the Civil
Rights Movement. Overall I think it went really well, and I was so honored to
be invited to talk and have such a great response from the audience.
I am very excited about the new steps I am taking and
absolutely love the work I get to do. It is nice to see things come together
and the impact it has on the community.
