By Reporter staff

The Jewish Federation of Greater Binghamton has formed a Needs Assessment Workgroup, which will be co-chaired by Shelley Hubal, Federation executive director, and Nancy Dorfman, a member of the Federation board. The group will focus primarily on identifying local community needs and to determine their relative priority as part of its mission “to create a caring, vibrant, enduring community locally.”

“As the demographics and resources of our community change over time, it is important to periodically examine our priorities and determine where we have opportunities to better meet those needs,” said Hubal. “As a local umbrella organization, we may also identify some potential opportunities for synergy and collaboration between organizations in the Greater Binghamton area.”

“The goal of the workgroup is to identify community needs and priorities in alignment with the Federation’s mission,” Dorfman added. “We plan to provide feedback, which we hope will be useful to the Federation board when it reviews allocation requests in the fall.”

The group held its first meeting on June 28 and expects to hold one or two more meetings before offering providing its feedback to the Federation board. Workgroup members include board and non-board members, and feature a range of demographics from the community. The Workgroup’s first meeting lasted two hours and its agenda was to review the participants’ responses to a needs assessment exercise created by Hubal and Dorfman. 

“Our first meeting was focused on identifying priorities,” said Hubal. “The committee recognized that we need to engage community members of all ages. Some priorities, such as the need for security were easily agreeable, while others required more in-depth conversation.”

Hubal also noted the many roles the Federation plays in the community, including organizing events to connect community members and community organizations, raising and allocating funds, providing Jewish educational, cultural and spiritual programming, and collaborative social services. She sees these as vital to the community, but noted that it’s important to prioritize needs, identify how these needs tie into the Federation’s mission and to also determine whether there are needs which are not currently being met.