As she heads for a new position as executive director of the Healthcare Foundation of New Jersey, Marsha Atkind said her “whole adult life prepared me for this job.”
Photo by Robert Wiener
November 27, 2008
For the first time in a long career in Jewish communal work, Marsha Atkind will concentrate on dispensing money, not trying to raise it.
And as she begins her new job Dec. 1 as executive director of the Healthcare Foundation of New Jersey, she expects the work to be even more challenging than her years of fund-raising.
“I think that spending money wisely and well is very difficult,” she said. “It’s very exciting but it is very difficult to put your dollars where they are most needed and where they are going to be used in an effective way.”
That has been the primary mission of the 12-year-old foundation, which was established with proceeds from the sale of Newark Beth Israel Medical Center to the Saint Barnabas Health Care System.
The foundation disburses between four and six million dollars a year in grants for medical research, public health initiatives, and other services for underserved populations in Essex, Morris, and Union counties — some in the Jewish community, others in inner-city Newark and other disadvantaged areas.
Grant recipients include hospitals and school-based clinics and Jewish-run efforts that combat domestic abuse, support seniors living in naturally occurring retirement communities, and provide transportation for nursing home residents.
The foundation awards grants to other charitable institutions, including United Jewish Communities of MetroWest NJ, where Atkind most recently served as manager of Women’s Philanthropic Initiatives.
Regarding the process of choosing recipients of Healthcare Foundation funds, Atkind said, “It is very important that the grantees take steps to secure funding from other sources. It is one of the criteria we look at: What will they be able to do when we move out?”
Lester Z. Lieberman, chair of the foundation’s board, told NJ Jewish News that Atkind was considered the most qualified among 150 applicants.
“She is very impressive. She talks straight. She is very bright, and her integrity is unquestioned,” he said. “Everyone I spoke with had nothing but admiration and respect for her.”
Atkind will succeed Robert Hyfler, a political scientist who headed the foundation since July 2006. “He is a man of unquestioned integrity who felt it was time for a change,” said Lieberman. “He is leaving on very amicable terms.”
‘Doing the most good’
Three days before leaving her office on the Alex Aidekman Family Jewish Community Campus in Whippany, Atkind pondered the challenges she will face.
“It is a very difficult time. The foundation’s assets are diminished, just as everyone else’s are, and the needs are just as great if not greater,” she said. “We have to balance the priorities of keeping assets intact and meeting the needs we are in business to meet. We have to be very strategic in the grants we give and make sure they are doing the most good they can possibly do.”
A Brooklyn native who graduated from the University of Pennsylvania and studied at Columbia University Law School, Atkind served as national president of the National Council of Jewish Women from 2002 to 2005.
She segued from that volunteer job to a professional role at UJC MetroWest, where her first assignment was organizing the Jewish Women’s Foundation, an adjunct of the Jewish Community Foundation of MetroWest.
The JWF currently has 47 members, who created an endowment “totaling about $850,000,” she said. “It is really fabulous. They have done two rounds of granting, some inside the Jewish community, and some outside. It is very exciting.”
In April, she assumed her current position at UJC MetroWest.
The Healthcare Foundation addresses a number of women’s issues — including domestic violence and eating disorders — but Atkind said she doesn’t believe her “background with women’s issues per se is relevant. I think my background in foundation giving is relevant.”
As she begins commuting from her home in Roseland to her new office in Millburn, Atkind said, her own future will include becoming a member of the JWF and retaining her seat on the board of NJ Jewish News, where she served as president from 2000 to 2002.
Atkind said she believes her “whole adult life prepared me for this job. I have almost always been involved in the nonprofit world. I have always had a great desire to make the community a better place, and I get great satisfaction in feeling that something I am involved with has made life better for some people.
“Healthcare is an established foundation, but every new grant is a new possibility and there is a chance to use my insight and help the people around me use their insights and their talents to make it be the best it can be.”
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