Letter from Our Executive Director and Our President

Connections. That’s the theme of this year’s annual report and the basis behind all the engagement, social justice and advocacy, and educational work NCJW/CLE imparts in the community. 

It’s through connection that people feel heard, listened to, and understood. NCJW/CLE has always been a natural connecter, long before it required a Zoom login or strong wifi.

That’s why the pandemic – with its emphasis on physical distancing – was hard for so many of us.  While social distancing kept us safe, it also created emotional distance. So many of us craved that feeling of connection more than ever.

Despite – or perhaps because of this – NCJW/CLE spent much of 2020/2021 finding innovative ways to keep our members and community together. We invested in our virtual technology – and laughed as we reminded one another – sometimes multiple times a day – to turn on or off the mute button on Zoom.

We organized monthly virtual meet ups as a way for members to gather informally and share joys and losses.  We hosted weekly online programs with experts like Dr. Amy Acton, the former Director of Ohio’s Department of Health and Jen Miller, the Executive Director of the League of Women Voters, Ohio, so that we could stay connected to what was happening in the world, and get advice on how to continue making a difference – even from home. And we continued our important advocacy, social justice and community engagement work, asking our partners where their greatest needs were, then working with our volunteers and members to fill those holes.

We found ways to connect, offline too. In the past year, our NCJW/CLE volunteers made and donated more than 2,000 masks to those in need, including pediatric patients at MetroHealth hospital and caretakers and residents at Menorah Park, we gave away 2,655 warm winter items for Operation Warm Up to community members in homeless shelters and households in need in the Slavic Village and Mount Pleasant neighborhoods, and we wrote over 5,000 handwritten letters, encouraging low-propensity voters to go to the polls. We also started the Barbara Mandel Emergency Relief Fund to help communities facing hard times because of the pandemic.  Through this fund, we helped provide computers and internet hot spots to places like the Domestic Violence and Child Advocacy Center’s shelter and to The LGBT Community Center of Greater Cleveland, to help lessen the digital divide they were feeling, too.

As humans, the need to connect is at our core. We, at NCJW/CLE are proud that throughout 2020 and into 2021, we were able to find ways to keep that connection going – so when we met, again, in real time, our connection never waned.