Joshua Rednik, the new executive director of the Jewish Community Foundation of MetroWest, sets his sights on attracting a younger generation to planned giving.
Photo by Robert Wiener
March 06, 2008
As the new kid on the block, Joshua Rednik wants young people to think about estate planning.
Newly appointed as executive director of the Jewish Community Foundation of MetroWest NJ, Rednik spent his first day at work Feb. 28 “just getting acclimated, getting my computer up and running, and making sure I don’t trip over myself.”
But he had a broad picture of his new responsibilities clearly in mind.
Although part of his mission is to attract an older generation to include the foundation in their estate planning, Rednik said foundation giving is a good choice for younger philanthropists as well.
“There are lots of attractive opportunities for younger people to endow gifts through life insurance and putting bequests in their estate plans now, when they are young,” he said. “You don’t have to be old and you don’t have to be rich. You can create an endowment of some kind for a lot less than the average person might think,” he said.
The minimum amount required for a charitable gift to the foundation is $10,000, he said.
“For a younger crowd, what this organization does is one of the best-kept secrets around,” he said as he sat in his office on the Aidekman campus in Whippany. “It is up to us to make it attractive and sexy for a younger set. I think it is based on how they get involved and what opportunities we can show them for leadership in ways that are vital to Jewish life.”
Planned giving has become an increasingly important vehicle for community fund-raising institutions like United Jewish Communities of MetroWest NJ, the JCF’s parent body. As of Jan. 1, JCF has assets exceeding $285 million, up from $201 million in July 2004.
Rednik succeeds Anat Becker, who recently left to become the director of planned giving and estates at Hadassah, the Women’s Zionist Organization of America.
Rednik’s own involvement in Jewish philanthropy began after he graduated as a psychology major from Washington University in St. Louis, then earned a master’s degree in clinical social work at Bryn Mawr College outside Philadelphia.
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From 1997 to 2006 he rose through the ranks of the Washington, DC, Jewish federation, from fund-raiser to manager of its endowment.
Then, in March 2006, he said, “we moved up here to South Orange in order to be closer to our families.” Debi Rednik, his wife, works as an attorney at the Hess Corporation in Woodbridge. They have a two-year-old son named Ethan and a five-and-a-half-year-old daughter named Sydney, who attends kindergarten at the South Mountain School Annex.
For the past nine months, he has served as acting director of planned giving and endowments at the UJA Federation of New York.
He said his two previous jobs have been valuable preparation for his present assignment.
“In Washington I learned the guts of fund-raising — how you go about engaging people in the work we do and what it means to interact with donors on a regular basis,” said Rednik. “Then when I transitioned into planned giving, it was a lot about how you take things that are very technical in nature and make them palatable to a group of donors interested in investing in the community.
“I’ve been able to take major donor development skills and a reasonable amount of technical knowledge and marry them together in a way that I am able to make a compelling case for foundation giving.”
Rednik said his own family’s story inspired his commitment to Jewish communal work.
“My dad’s parents escaped Lodz, Poland, just before World War II. My dad was born in a squatters’ camp in Kazakhstan, and his family wound up immigrating to the Lower East Side of New York,” he said. “When they came here they were assisted by a social worker from the federation in New York and the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society. Were it not for the work they did to support my family, I wouldn’t be here right now.”
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