6/6/2008 10:23:00 AM COVER: Accessing the Chai Life
AJC’s precocious young-adult group still growing at 18
Access events aim to mix fun and education in a Jewish context.
Michael Jacobs The Jewish Times
David Duke is a former Ku Klux Klan leader and neo-Nazi. He also played an important role in making Jewish Atlanta the thriving community it is today.
In 1990 he was a Louisiana legislator preparing to run for governor the next year, and people feared his political potential. One evening about 30 young Jewish adults gathered on a porch in Atlanta to hear an expert speaker discuss Duke. It was the first event for Access, the young-adult organization of the Atlanta chapter of the American Jewish Committee.
Eighteen years later, Duke is a footnote in American history, having faded into the political fringes after the 1991 gubernatorial election. Access, on the other hand, has grown into a vibrant piece of the Jewish community, an entry point for people under age 40 who want to get involved and who go on from Access to fill leadership roles in synagogues, Federation and other Jewish organizations, including the AJC. It is a model of success for other young-adult groups in Atlanta, and the AJC two years ago adopted the name and approach of Access for similar groups at chapters across the country.
Access was set to celebrate its 18th birthday - with the dual symbolism of 18 being the numeric value of the Hebrew word for life, chai, and being the age of adulthood in America - by holding a casino night party, L'chaim to Access, June 5 at Park Tavern. As is typical for Access, the event aimed to mix fun and education in a Jewish context, including toasts from non-Jewish community leaders who reflect the bridge-building mission of the AJC.
That balance of the social and the serious has been a constant for Access since that first night on Kent Alexander's back porch. When he wasn't worrying about the porch collapsing under the weight of so many people, Alexander said, he could tell, "just looking around and seeing everybody engaged and mesmerized by the speaker and relaxing, this was an idea that was going to work."
The idea originated with the AJC board, whose president at the time happened to be Alexander's mother, Elaine. She and other board members and the executive director at the time, Sherry Frank, recognized that the Atlanta chapter could use an injection of youth. It was natural for the board to bring the idea to Kent Alexander, not only because both of his parents had served as chapter president, but also because he and his friends, including Elise Eplan, had just launched another successful nonprofit group, Hands On Atlanta.
Now Alexander, Eplan, Beth Paradies and others were going to create a place to connect fellow young Jewish leaders to the AJC.
"As we sat and thought about it, we could never have dreamed about what it has become today," Eplan said, but they did have confidence.
"A lot of the success and the reason we felt optimistic from the beginning was the tremendous buy-in from the lay leadership," she said.
The chapter's financial commitment meant that money wouldn't be a barrier to Access membership. Access events, usually held in homes, were free, and the AJC chapter lowered the cost of regular events to Access members.
"Now that's the norm," Eplan said, "but it wasn't then."
Unlike, say, Federation's Young Leadership Council, Access wasn't a fundraising vehicle. And unlike a synagogue, it provided a forum for interaction across denominational and geographical lines.
"It was more of an intellectual and social aspect of the religious community," Alexander said.
The AJC's involvement in social action, interfaith dialogue and hot political topics appealed to young people once the financial obstacles were gone, Alexander said, and Access was able to build on a core of second- and third-generation AJC members such as himself.
Eplan did not have a family connection to the AJC but said she was drawn by its Black-Jewish Coalition and its public policy work and by the opportunity for meaningful engagement in the Jewish community at an early age.
The Access name, Eplan said, reflected the approach of the group: to make the AJC agenda accessible to potential young leaders and provide those young leaders access to experienced Jewish lay leaders and to the diplomats and others who are frequent guests of the Atlanta chapter.
"For some of us to come, it was a big deal. It made us feel we were really a part of things," she said. The lay leaders and professional staff were enthusiastic about the new group, and Eplan said she never felt like Access was segregated as a junior auxiliary to the AJC.
Ross Kogon, who joined Access a decade after its founding and completed a two-year term as co-chairman last year, said the full integration of Access into the AJC has been a constant and a key to its success.
"It's really exciting to see how excited (AJC board members) are about Access," said Susie Fages, who was Kogon's co-chair for one of Access' signature events, Young Professionals Night at the Atlanta Jewish Film Festival, before chairing the full organization with him. She said the AJC board takes a keen interest in everything Access does but resists the urge to interfere.
Kogon said that's one of three main reasons Access works. The others:
• Maintaining a focus on the mission - "engaging Jewish people to act Jewishly and learn how to act Jewishly to the outside world."
• Being one of the first places in the Atlanta Jewish community where young adults got a real opportunity to lead and were not stuck in a junior corps.
Access, which Kogon joined about eight years ago, filled a void in the community for a place to ignite a Jewish spark in young adults.
Now every Jewish organization has young-adult programming, Kogon said. "Access' evolution to me is interesting because the mission has somewhat evolved from being a place where young adults could do something to a place where young Jewish adults could do something Jewish to now the mission is somewhat building into 'As these young Jewish adults are engaging with the rest of the world, how do they do so in a Jewish way?' Which really matches up with the mission of the AJC, which is being the State Department of the Jewish community."
If the AJC is the State Department, Access is the training ground for the diplomatic corps.
Eplan was the first Access chair to become president of the AJC's Atlanta chapter, a position she held from 2003 to 2005. Alexander, who never chaired Access, succeeded Eplan as president of the AJC chapter. Many other Access veterans have served on the AJC chapter board.
The idea was always that Access membership would lead to AJC membership for decades to come, and Alexander said the hope was that Access would develop the chapter's leaders of the future. Board members talked about that prospect, but the Access founders had a hard time looking beyond the first year.
"It just showed a lot of foresight by people with more wisdom than we had," Alexander said.
Eplan said that when her peers began to join the chapter board, it was a sign that Access had succeeded. Alexander said that when Eplan became president, it sent a message to Access members that they had a path to the top.
One result, chapter Executive Director Judy Marx said, is that Atlanta has the youngest board of any chapter in the country. The Atlanta chapter also is the largest and most active in the nation, and chapter activities draw a younger crowd than is typical for the AJC.
Now chapters across the country are rolling out Access to replicate that success.
"Other chapters once or twice a month call about how Access worked and what to do and what to avoid," Marx said. "The power of involving young people is really immeasurable."
The AJC has taken steps to help turn Access leaders into chapter leaders.
A connections program pairs Access steering committee members with AJC board members. They agree to meet just once for coffee or lunch, but that one meeting usually is enough to build a friendship that enhances the AJC.
In addition, longtime AJC members Candy and Steve Berman endowed a leadership program to help Access members make the transition to top roles in the full chapter.
Not everyone who serves on the Access steering committee winds up on the AJC board, but many go on to leadership positions at synagogues and other Jewish agencies, Marx said.
Those community leaders might have been like the majority of Jews in Atlanta - on the sidelines, unaffiliated and unengaged - if not for Access.
"The professionals' job is to make sure that their organization is doing their mission and staying on task, but it's the lay leaders' job to be the cheerleaders and make sure that the whole community is pulling their weight and doing their job and being a part of the whole picture, and I think that Access has done a wonderful job of allowing people to do that ... at a young age," Kogon said. "It's a good thing. It's good for the Jews."
One example Kogon brought into Access is Avery Kastin, an Atlanta-area native who this month begins a two-year term as co-chairman of the Access steering committee, replacing Shira Blate and joining Jonathan Ganz.
Kastin was looking for a way to engage with the Jewish community four years ago. His involvement at that point was almost nonexistent. "Access was, no pun intended, the most accessible route to that. It was just a great fit for me."
Access attracted him because it offered social events mixed with social action, all within a Jewish context. The organization's strength, he said, is that "each individual can make their choice on what kind of balance they want to strike."
The 400 or so Access members can go to events that are heavy on the fun, such as L'chaim to Access and the opening party each fall; events that are similar in scale but are as much educational as social, such as Entrepreneurs Night, the Access night at the film festival and a summer party Kastin launched last year at the Carlos Museum; or smaller gatherings that encourage interfaith and interethnic dialogue.
"I think Access has worked because it's not about singles. It's not a matchmaking organization," Marx said. That's not to say Jewish singles can't make connections at the parties or happy hours, but because that's not the purpose, people don't leave Access when they either pair up or give up on finding romance through the group.
Everything has to meet the AJC mission, Marx said. A program on salsa dancing might be fun, she said, but fun is not part of the mission statement. To be an Access program, an additional element is required, such as a dialogue with the Hispanic community on the place of salsa dancing in Latino culture.
Not every program hits the mark, Kogon said, but "there's never been any situation where people didn't want any content. The question is what is the right way to get content across so it works, so it's not disjointed."
Kastin said he hopes Access can work with other groups to show young adults that there is a larger Jewish community in Atlanta with lots of opportunities. "So many want to get involved but don't know how."
Ganz said Access itself has the organization in place to make the most of new ideas. When he joined nine years ago, Access likely couldn't have pulled off a party at the Carlos Museum or a latke cooking class, he said. "I just think there's no program that we can imagine now that we can't pull off."
He hopes to see Access hold more small programs on particular topics and dialogue with non-Jewish groups on shared interests. "I take nothing away from any of the other Jewish organizations in town, but I really feel like if you want to stretch your mind, Access is the best spot in the city."
Marx would like to see Access stretch minds by digging deeper into the tough issues of the day, from energy independence to the role of religion in politics. Access can develop "smart, creative, interesting ways for people to engage on those issues."
Tackling those tough issues would keep Access moving in the direction it established 18 years ago with the David Duke program on Alexander's back porch.
"We planted this little seed. They have made this big tree grow and blossom," Eplan said. "The leadership that is coming in continues to breed new life and make it better and better."
