A massive campus carries a massive price tag, and needs a massive donation.
That was the thinking when the S.F.-based Jewish Community Federation pushed through a $10 million gift from its endowment fund to Palo Alto’s Taube-Koret Campus for Jewish Life, a 340,000-square-foot project encompassing a Jewish senior facility, a JCC and offices for myriad Jewish organizations.
The mid-May donation is the largest the JCF has ever put toward a capital project, and one of several eight-digit donations the campus has received.
“This has been a priority of the federation’s for quite some time. [The campus] will be the core of the Jewish community of the South Peninsula,” said Tom Dine, the federation’s CEO. “It will be the home of the Jewish Home and the JCC on a road that also houses a Jewish day school and high school. The whole area is becoming the central place for Jewish communal life.”
The Jewish Community Endowment Fund donation pushes the campus’ total to $85 million of a projected $150 million.
The federation’s donation to the Palo Alto campus “had to be significant because this is a significantly large project. The overall estimate is $150 million. So this isn’t even 10 percent. But we wanted our gift to be one of the largest,” said Dine.
Shelley Hebert, the campus’ executive director, pointed out that the federation’s involvement in her project goes back to day one, when the JCF loaned the campus half a million dollars to fund legal expenses and due-diligence work when shoring up the former Sun Microsystems campus that will one day be the Campus for Jewish Life.
“This gift represents their major, major financial investment in the project, and it really has been in discussion now for the last couple of years … but more intensely since Tom Dine’s arrival in late 2005,” said Hebert.
The gift pushed the campus up well past half of its intended fund-raising goal. Hebert aims to “close” negotiations for at least an additional $27 million during the month of June, pushing the grand total to $112 million, or 75 percent of the total.
She hopes the final goal will be reached by spring of 2007, when groundbreaking is tentatively set. Requirements set by both the state and the campus’ bond-lenders mandate that groundbreaking cannot commence until 70 percent of the Jewish Home’s future 193 units have been pre-sold. Hebert hopes to open a sales and information center in Palo Alto this summer, so seniors can begin reserving units.
The timing of the campus’ fund-raising and housing reservation goals dovetail with appearances before Palo Alto’s planning and transportation commission and city council, and publication of the final draft of the campus’ Environmental Impact Report in June.
The Palo Alto JCC’s current lease expires in 2010, so there is motivation for the estimated two-year construction project to get under way on time.
Both Hebert and Dine credited the federation’s 2004 Jewish Community Study with expediting the gift. The study confirmed the massive Jewish population growth on the Peninsula over the past two decades to the point where the Palo Alto area houses a plurality of the Bay Area’s Jews.
“For federation to come up with this level of gift really endorses the growing nature of the Jewish community in the South Peninsula and the understanding of the demographic study,” said David Friedman, the chairman of the Jewish Home’s board of trustees.
Added Steve Bauman, president of the Palo Alto JCC’s board, “For years no one got what was going on here on the Peninsula. This is a dramatic demonstration of how the federation is making sure the South Peninsula is just as vibrant as San Francisco.”