An experimental nonprofit that sought to help young adults connect to the Bay Area Jewish community will close at the end of June.
Monday’s announcement marks a disappointing end for GatherBay. The group traces its roots to a small initiative called “Gather the Jews” in Washington, D.C., a decade ago that expanded to the Bay Area in 2022 with a focus on the East Bay. GatherDC, the organization’s flagship program, will remain open.
GatherBay cited fundraising challenges. Its annual budget is around $400,000, according to Caroline Kessler, GatherBay’s community director and one of its two full-time employees.
GatherBay’s major funder has been the Rodan Family Foundation, which donated seed money to get the nonprofit off the ground in the Bay Area with the hope it would eventually become self-sustaining. The S.F.-based Jewish Community Federation and Endowment Fund has also been a financial supporter, Kessler said.
GatherBay faced considerable headwinds, including a complex landscape for Jewish philanthropy in a post-Oct. 7 world.
“A number of unpredictable events changed the whole Bay Area funding landscape, and made it such that we weren’t able to secure the long-term funding necessary to sustain the national project,” Kessler said, citing the lingering effects of the pandemic, the Oct. 7, 2023, attack in Israel leading to war and political shifts in D.C., as well as the recent wildfires in Los Angeles, which have diverted some philanthropic attention to rebuilding efforts in the city.
The animating idea for GatherBay and GatherDC is that to bring young adult Jews into the fold — and connect them to the Jewish community — it’s vital to help them form personal connections catered to their own individual interests. This is sometimes called the “relational” approach in the nonprofit world.
To do that, Gather sets up and pays for one-on-one meetups with young Jews, usually in their 20s or 30s, at a local coffee shop. There, a Gather employee gets a sense of how the young person would like to relate to the Jewish community. Then the nonprofit sends a series of follow-up emails and text messages with names of people to connect with around a diverse set of interests, from “rock climbing to Jewish meditation,” Kessler said, as well as Jewish community institutions, like synagogues, that might appeal to them.
GatherBay has hosted two to three events per month, plus Jewish learning sessions with its community rabbi, Gray Myrseth. It also publishes a Jewish community calendar on its website and sends an email newsletter to roughly 500 subscribers.
“On one level, it was an experiment that was really successful,” Kessler said, adding that over the last three years GatherBay had “connected friends and potential roommates and hosted holiday experiences and events that enriched people’s lives.”
“We met hundreds of young adults,” she added. “We spent time building meaningful connections. We did a lot of powerful work with Jewish professionals, giving them what they need to carve out Jewish identities.”
Elana Rodan Schuldt, president and CEO of the Rodan Family Foundation, told J. on Thursday that she is disappointed that the nonprofit is closing.
She had hoped that after a series of seed donations from the Rodan Family Foundation, GatherBay would find other local support to sustain itself over the long term. That didn’t materialize.
“I followed the Gather model for many years. I found their approach, based in interpersonal relationships, incredibly powerful,” Schuldt said.
The foundation, which moved its offices from Orinda to Los Angeles two years ago, focuses its philanthropic efforts on institutions in its local community — with a particular focus on education, Schuldt said.
Earlier this year, for example, the foundation announced a $15 million donation to the Milken Community School in Los Angeles.
“From the outset, the conversation was that we’re not a forever funder. We see our role as a catalyst,” Schuldt said, adding, “we are so proud of the impact GatherBay had on so many young adults, obviously we had hoped they would continue having impact for many years to come.”
Also on Monday, Kevin Berman, the board chair for Gather, Inc., a nationally focused nonprofit launched four years ago and GatherBay’s parent organization, announced that it will pause its work and “refocus on our home base in DC.”
“We have not been able to secure the long-term funding necessary to sustain Gather, Inc. as a national entity,” Berman wrote to the GatherBay community.