PARTNERSHIP FOR EXCELLENCE IN JEWISH EDUCATION

Programs: Coaching, knowledge and collaborations - as a leader in the field of jewish day school education, peje leverages its relationships to build partnerships and collaborations that benefit schools and communities. These include a partnership with jdata, a central repository of data related to jewish day schools and camps; collaboration with the denominational networks serving jewish day schools in order to offer joint conferences; a co-funded position with the orthodox union to gather and disseminate a repository of best practices in the area of jewish day school affordability; and partnerships with a number of communities in north america to offer sustainability initiatives to their schools. Coaching is a core element of all our programs and coaches who can benefit day school sustainability are identified, vetted, and deployed to the field through our programs. We also host a leadership line, a no cost one-hour consultation with a peje coach.

endowment and legacy - generations, a pilot program to help day schools raise endowment and legacy funds, is in its fourth year and is a partnership of peje, the avi chai foundation and local communities in los angeles, baltimore, new york and boston. Providing overall program management, peje works with each community to support and oversee participating schools with the goal of each school raising approximately $4k per student in endowment/legacy gifts by the end of the three-year program. As of the end of august, 2014, the 35 schools had raised $28 million.

community initiatives: annual campaign and recruitment and retention - peje supported the cause of jewish day school sustainability through a number of multi-school initiatives designed to help schools generate incremental tuition and fundraising revenues. Peje implemented the legacy heritage leadership and fundraising academy in 20 schools including 11 in south florida and 9 in the texas cities of houston and dallas. The focus of this program is to increase annual fundraising by improving board governance. As a result of these interventions the 20 schools averaged a 20 percent increase in funds raised and strengthened their board of directors' engagement in philanthropy. Peje ran a two day recruitment and retention academy in chicago in may of 2014 that provided 34 jewish day schools with access to leading edge expertise drawn from the independent and jewish day school field. Each participating school completed our recruitment self- assessment tool and received one day of coaching support to enable them to develop improvement plans. Additionally, six chicago schools received access to six additional days of coaching support thanks to a grant received from two chicago foundations. Additionally, peje conducted qualitative market research for five of the chicago schools to learn how to increase the appeal of jewish day schools to potential families.

communications and advocacy - peje's role as a field leader and a producer and disseminator of knowledge relies on our capacity to effectively utilize the web and social media. The marketing and advocacy team supports peje's mission through various activities online and in person. Our multifaceted and dynamic website offers rich content to the jewish day school field and serves as the application portal for peje's three revenue programs whose application launched in summer 2014. The site managed over 150 program application requests in fy'14 and averages over 300 unique hits per month. The team sent out a monthly e-newsletter to over 5500 people driving web traffic and promoting peje's work. In addition, the team manages an active social media presence on facebook with over 1550 followers. In fy'14, the team provided social media consultation to schools and other members of the field both for free and for a fee. The peje blog was supported by six experts from the field writing for peje, and the blogs were turned into sustainable stories, now available for download on the web. Lastly, the marketing team supported peje's programmatic offerings with marketing consultation and support. Affordability - as the issue of affordability continued to dominate discussions about the future of jewish day schools, peje maintained an office focused on sharing knowledge and resources related to school and community based approaches to the challenge of rising tuition. Building on a series of whitepapers published in fy'13, peje used fy'14 to develop a day school affordability index and adapt and test an asset optimization tool (developed by and for independent schools) for the jewish day school field. The tool and methodology was introduced at a spring 2014 jewish day school conference.