Town Halls, Teaching, and Teeth

Hello everyone! It’s been a while since I last posted, things have been very busy! So at the end of March I held my final town hall event for the children of Survivors to find out if they had any additional input in the needs of their parents, or others in the community. Overall, I think the event was a success. It allowed us to listen to the community, and also educate the children on the services we provide. As the parents age, it is important that we reach out to their children so they know what services JFS provides. With the conclusion of the town hall I have been able to officially finalize the needs assessment report.

In the meantime I was able to finalize, and send out, the first ever JFS Holocaust Survivor Newsletter. The newsletter keeps the Survivor community informed about happenings at JFS that are relevant to them. While many younger clients can check out our facebook page, or are on our eblast list, most survivors are not. This newsletter will allow them to know what restitution funds are available, what services we offer, and what JFS is doing to improve services for the Survivor community. I was able to mail out about 500 newsletters to our clients and distribute additional copies into the community.  We have had an overwhelming response from the community, with lots of calls coming in from Survivors asking about new programs that we have started at JFS. I am excited that we can engage on this level with the community, and possibly connect them to new programs and resources that can help them age in their homes.

The other big thing I’ve been working on for the last few months has been a large all staff training event. I’ve been developing an interactive and engaging presentation to educate the staff at JFS about the Holocaust in time for Yom HaShoah, which was a couple weeks ago. I have always been very passionate about Holocaust education, and was honored to be asked to speak with my colleagues about an event that had a huge impact on Jewish history, and really affects what we do here at JFS. The presentation went incredibly well and all of the technology cooperated. I was able to integrate pictures, videos, and live polling in the presentation to help make it more interactive and interesting. It is a fine line to walk in Holocaust education between making the content accessible and engaging without trivializing the history.

Since the lecture I’ve been hard at work. I’ve been coordinating a new pilot program in Metro-Detroit. The Alpha Omega Henry Schein Cares Holocaust Survivors Oral Health Program. The goal of the program is to help the most financially vulnerable in the Survivor community with the express goals of eliminating pain and restoring function.  So far I have been able to refer out about 8 Survivors who are receiving amazing care from many volunteer dentists in our community. Many people don’t think about the challenges associated with having oral health problems, but there are many and they can impact many parts of your life. Hopefully this program will allow those with the most need to live their lives with one less problem as they age. 

One last thing... today is my mother's birthday. Happy Birthday Mom!!

Outreach, Needs Assessment, and Education

Well it has been a whirlwind couple of weeks. I have been working on the staff training and I am very happy that JFS has decided to make the first in the series a mandatory training. It will take place just before Yom HaShoah and will start with a breakfast and I will present for about an hour and a half. Overall an hour and a half is not a lot of time to lecture about something as complex as the Holocaust, but I believe that it will allow the staff an opportunity to refresh their current knowledge, learn about new aspects, and possibly interest them in learning more. The plan is to provide optional “booster” trainings that will look at additional topics more in depth. The first couple of boosters will discuss topics that relate to our Survivor population, based on where many of them come from and experience that many of them had. The other boosters will be based on feedback from staff. I will survey the staff to see what topics they are interested in, and pick a couple of topics based on that feedback. In addition to offering training, I have also been working to offer continuing education credits for staff that need it. Having this foundation in place is good and will allow us to keep learning as a staff, and in the future we can then apply for CEUs for the community wide training we plan to create.

I am very excited to announce that we have finally set a date and time for our children of survivors town hall. This town hall will allow the children of survivors, who quite often are care providers for their parents, to discuss the needs of their parents, as well as an opportunity for them to find out about the services JFS provides. This town hall is the final step in my comprehensive needs assessment of the survivor community in Metro Detroit. Once this step is completed, I can finalize my report and present it to JFS and other organizations. I am very excited to hear from this group as they often have a different perspective on the needs, and are more willing to disclose the needs of their parents. It is often harder to ask for help for yourself, than it is to ask for help for someone else.

Finally, I attended the February Café Europa and had another amazing time. I ended up staying an hour past the end of the event to continue talking with an amazing survivor I met. She was imprisoned at Auschwitz and worked in the munitions factory. She was absolutely fascinating to talk to, and she had so much to share with me. I feel very fortunate that she was willing to talk to me not just about her experiences during the Holocaust, but her needs, her feelings about what JFS is doing, and even what she thinks about the world she lives in today. I am so grateful that I am allowed to share this time with the survivors, as it allows me an opportunity to remember why I am doing what I am doing, and that everything I do has an impact in the lives of these amazing people. 

Seeing the Impact of Service

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.  

Celebrating Life, Renewal, and Hope at Chanukah

It has been a busy week (give or take a few days)! With the success of the survey results that was directly sent to survivors, we decided to add another component. We decided that we would reach out to the children of survivors and see if they have any thoughts on what their parents might need. During our town hall meetings in October we had a couple of children of survivors attend and they had some interested feedback on the needs of their parents, which led us to then wonder if we shouldn’t just ask their children at a special meeting. There is a group in the area here, called CHAIM that is comprised of the children and grandchildren of survivors.  We reached out to them and were invited to speak at their board meeting. We went and briefly explained what I am doing as a VISTA for JFS and the survivor community, and then asked them if they thought the children of survivors would want to have an opportunity to be heard. It was a resounding yes from everyone there and we agreed to collaborate for this phase of the needs assessment. CHAIM will provide the addresses to the children of survivors and I will develop a survey to assess their parent’s needs as well as a letter/flyer to invite them to a town hall meeting where they can come and not only discuss their parent’s needs, but also find out the services provided by JFS. At the board meeting, we found out that, many of the people in the community do not know what JFS does, or that we even provide assistance for survivors. With that in mind, we will be sure to include a fair amount of time during our town hall to discuss the services provided by JFS.

The next day I had the great fortune to be able to meet up with the Holocaust Advisory Committee that meets quarterly and is the group of survivors that help guide us in relation to our work with the Claims Conference. They have been a great help, and a major advocate, for my work here at JFS. I was able to share with them the preliminary results of the needs assessment survey and they were able to respond with their reactions, which were very positive. They agreed with all of the conclusions drawn so far and agreed that the children of survivors may offer an important window into the needs of survivors.

For years at JFS there has been discussions about generating a newsletter for the survivor community about a variety of topics of relevance to the survivor community (new indemnification funds, expansion or changes to services provided, community outreach information, etc.). With the recent announcement of an increase in funds from the Claims Conference and new indemnification funds coming available in the New Year, the feeling that we need to create a newsletter to inform the community has only grown. During our meeting with the committee we asked if they felt this would also be a worthwhile endeavor and they agreed that it would be good to have a newsletter a couple of times a year that keeps survivors up to date on what is going on both at JFS and in the complicated world of indemnification and the Claims Conference. We wanted to make sure that the newsletter represents the interests of survivors and asked if members of the committee would also be interested in working with me to develop the articles, etc. The thought was that this way the newsletter would focus on the questions of the survivor community as well as the information the survivor community needs. I’m very excited about this new project and look forward to working both with JFS, the Holocaust Advisory Committee and the local agencies that work with survivors.

Finally, I got to attend the December Café Europa event at the Jewish Community Center in Oak Park. This is always one of the best parts of my job. I get to sit and talk with Holocaust survivors. Not just about their needs, but also about what they have been doing lately, what I have been doing, the weather, whatever comes up. It is a great opportunity for me to remind myself why I am doing what I’m doing. This time the Café Europa was a special event. We got to celebrate Chanukah! Not being Jewish myself, I have never really participated in the traditions associated with the holiday, so this was an opportunity not only for me to learn, but also for me to be taught by an amazing group of survivors. We were joined children from a local Jewish school who come every year to meet survivors and learn what it was like when the survivors celebrated Chanukah as children and during World War II. It was an incredibly moving site to see the future generations of Jewish children sitting and eating potato latkes with survivors and discussing the past, and the future. This also gave me the opportunity to try my very first latkes, which was delicious and I would like to eat every day if I could! After we ate, a young man was called up to be offered congratulations by the group because he will soon have his bar mitzvah. After loud applause from his peers as well as the survivors, the real party began.  The music was a mix of traditional Jewish music and some newer more popular music. Soon enough a survivor had demanded I come dance with her and a young man from the school and the three of us were up and dancing to “I’ve got a feeling” which led to a great time explaining to the survivor what the song was about, and why someone would write a song like that. Either way, we had a lot of fun as we all danced around the room. This experience is one of the most touching and memorable ones I have had so far at JFS, and it reignited my passion for what I am here to do. 

Here are a few pictures I snapped at the Cafe Europa

What do survivors want, and how to find out

A few weeks have passed since my last post. It’s been a busy couple of weeks implementing the final stages of the needs assessment of the Holocaust survivor community. Since I last wrote, the first mailing of the survey reached a 56% response rate that is beyond our wildest dreams. With the success of the first mailing, I moved on to expand how many survivors we mailed the survey to. We had to compile lists from various programs, and then I had to build those into a mail merge so that I could actually send the surveys. The second set of mailings consisted of almost 200 more survivors that we had not yet heard from.  By doubling the amount of survivors we reach, I am hoping to not only reach a majority of our current clients, but also to get a full picture of the needs of the community. I am still getting quite a few surveys back every day, and the new combined response rate is  42% which is still high considering the fact I double the amount of people mailed.

In addition to the surveys and previous town halls, I built and deployed a survey for our Geriatric Care Managers (GCMs) to see if they had any feedback on services they thought their survivor clients could use. By being able to survey this group of people that have a different perspective on the needs of survivors I’m hoping to both corroborate the direct survey results, and see if there are needs that survivors either don’t think of, or are reluctant to admit.
The final phase of the needs assessment will come with the town hall meetings I am working on planning for the children and grandchildren of survivors. My hope is that they too can corroborate, or possibly provide additional feedback as to the needs of the survivor community. Once I have finished collecting the data I will build an official report and begin acting to improve the services provided to the community.

Meanwhile, while I wait for surveys to come in and work on the plans for future town hall meetings, I have been researching issue related to building volunteer based programs, while also taking a course through AmeriCorps in Resource Development. The course has been very helpful overall because it has allowed me to learn not only about the ethical standards required for fundraising and best practices involved, but how to write letters asking for donations, as well as how to apply for grants from larger institutions. Hopefully this information will come in handy when I am at the stage of developing new programs at JFS and need to find financial support for these initiatives.

Assessing the Needs of Shoah Survivors

Last week flew by! I was a little worried after having the extra days off for all of the Jewish holidays, but I always seem to find a way to fill up the time, plus some! On Monday, I attended the October Café Europa and got to meet even more survivors. I was able to introduce myself to the group and hand out copies of the flyers for our town hall meetings that were later in the week. I was also able to give out and collect surveys from survivors who knew they would not be able to attend the town hall events.  I also had the opportunity to talk to survivors about how they are doing, what AmeriCorps is, and what I am hoping to do with my time at JFS. It was an amazing opportunity to let the survivor community know what I am up to, and personally, it meant a lot to me to be able to sit and talk with them about anything, even if it was just about the weather or the quality of the pool at the JCC. All of the survivors have been incredibly welcoming and willing, if not eager, to talk to me and include me in their conversations, etc.

On Wednesday, we had our first town hall meeting. The first one was held at the Oak Park Jewish Community Center in Russian. I was a little disappointed at first because we only had one survivor show up. In hindsight, I am grateful that he came. We were able to not only find out his needs, but we were able to learn about his story, his life before, during, and after the Holocaust. It was a great opportunity for me to connect with a member of the Russian speaking population.  The following town hall that afternoon, at the same location, but in English we had a better turnout. We were able to get a lot of feedback from those that attended, and I was able to collect more survey responses from those we had not yet reached. 

On Thursday, we held two more town hall meetings. The first meeting was at JFS, and we had two in attendance. While two may not sound like a lot, we received a ton of feedback from those two people. They were able to bring up issues and needs that had not been brought up by the previous groups.  Our later meeting was held at the Holocaust Memorial Center and had a smaller than hoped for attendance. We did, however, have several caregivers also attend, as well as someone from hospice that was able to provide another dimension of feedback. All of the survivors and others in attendance that I met with were able to provide critical feedback that will help shape my direction over the rest of my year. One of the most touching things to happen was when survivors and their children took the time to thank me for what I am doing. I am excited to be able to help survivors in any way I can, and it took me by surprise to be thanked for taking a year and trying to make a difference.

Now that I am done with the town hall meetings, I will move on to other parts of my outreach and needs assessment. I am currently looking into more direct mailings of surveys to survivors to get more feedback, and we are looking into setting up town hall events for the children and grandchildren of survivors. My hope is that by talking to the children and grandchildren of survivors separately I will be able to hear more feedback, and possibly gain a different perspective on the needs of the survivor community. So far, we have had over 52% response rate for our mailed survey! That is very exciting, and I never expected to get such a great response rate. These are just a few of the things I am looking at doing in the near future. I am more excited now for the rest of the work I have the privilege of doing than I was when I started the job. 

Until next week...