United Jewish Communities, the umbrella organization of North America's Jewish fund-raising federations, is reorganizing itself for the second time since 1999.

The changes will create an expanded Israel office and disband a cumbersome four-part structure that defined the organization's mission as: Israel, social services, financial development, and "renaissance and renewal," or Jewish identity.

UJC leaders say the changes are necessary to streamline a system that has not achieved the goals that were set when the organization was formed in 1999. Changes also are needed, they say, to adapt to a modern philanthropic world in which private foundations are achieving more than grassroots philanthropy.

Locally, federation leaders welcomed the process and praised UJC for its self-scrutiny.

Max Kleinman, executive vice president of United Jewish Communities of MetroWest NJ, said he expects the reorganization will not affect day-to-day operations much.

"If it works, it will allow us to provide better services for our community," Kleinman said in a phone interview. "We want to have the most effective national organization we can have, and to the degree operations will be more seamless, it's more effective. It makes sense to centralize needs assessment from Israel."

Kleinman said his main concern is how the reorganization plan will be implemented and whether it will be successful – with success measured by numbers.

"Execution is very, very important," he said. "We have to raise more money and increase the number of donors."

The plan was first discussed at a November 2006 national UJC board of trustees meeting during the General Assembly in Los Angeles and again at the board's January meeting. It's also on the table for further discussion at another board meeting in Manhattan in June, according to a memo to UJC affiliates written by Joseph Kanfer, chairman of the UJC board of trustees.

The plan includes shifting part of the operation to an expanded Israel office, where a major function would be to reach out to wealthy philanthropists in that country and the former Soviet Union. This global outreach appears to be a significant departure for a system that has focused on North American donors. The reorganization essentially would create two teams, domestic and Israeli.

"If we fail to move in this direction now, UJC, too, will lose momentum and fail to achieve the dreams that were envisioned for it," concludes the background paper, dated March 16, that emerged from a meeting of selected top lay and professional UJC leaders. "UJC never lacked a vision; we have only lacked the full execution of well-laid plans. Let's not lose what may be our last chance to move forward."

The Council of Jewish Federations, United Jewish Appeal, and United Israel Appeal merged in 1999 to form United Jewish Communities. Its dual mandate was to increase the dollars coming into federation campaigns – with a specific mandate to increase funds for overseas needs – and to give the federations more services for the fees they were paying their national organizations.

Neither aim has been fully successful.

The North American federation donor base shrank from 630,486 donors in 1999 to 564,343 in 2005. And from 2001 to 2005, the last years for which numbers are available, the combined campaigns of North America's federations, adjusted for inflation, were down by 11.1 percent, according to official figures.

UJC leaders say it is still seen as a bloated organization, despite repeated cuts of staff and services that since 1999 have brought its budget down from $46.2 million to $38.7 million. They say the group's structure complicates the decision-making process and impedes setting a clear vision and following through on it.

The dues federations pay to UJC have been a point of contention, particularly for larger federations that do not feel they are receiving an adequate return in terms of services.

"The top priorities in my mind in creating these two teams are to focus on global operations and to do a much better job of servicing our stakeholder federations," Howard Rieger, UJC's president and CEO, said.

UJC leaders say the reorganization is made even more critical considering the success of endowment funds, capital campaigns, and recent emergency campaigns. In recent years the UJC system raised more than $4 billion in capital campaign money, another $358 million last year for its Israel Emergency Campaign, and about $50 million in supplemental campaigns for overseas and domestic disasters such as Hurricane Katrina.

The restructuring also appears to acknowledge that the federation system's traditional methods of courting major donors and reaching out to smaller donors, primarily through Super Sunday phonathons, need to be broadened.

It also suggests that the federation system needs to better tap into alternative revenue streams and to keep up with a philanthropic world that is becoming increasingly centered on private foundations, according to Jeffrey Solomon, the president of the Andrea and Charles Bronfman Philanthropies and a consultant on the original UJC merger.

A major part of the plan involves UJC's helping local federations figure out how to work with private foundations, which since 1990 have exploded.

Jewish foundations, with assets in excess of $30 billion, pump more money into the Jewish community than all the federation campaigns combined. Those foundations have yielded the creation of landmark Jewish initiatives, such as birthright israel, which has provided free Israel trips to some 100,000 Jews ages 18 to 26, and B'nei Tzedek, a project of the Harold Grinspoon Foundation that teaches teenagers how to become young philanthropists.

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What: United Jewish Communities

Goal: Streamline operations and sharpen the broad focus of the umbrella organization of North American federations

Proposed changes: Dissolve a "four pillar" structure, including the "renewal and renaissance" pillar, which focused on Jewish identity-building; run overseas and Israel aid operations out of headquarters in Jerusalem

Next step: Further discussion at UJC board of trustees meeting in Manhattan in June