Investing in a positive future

BASYA LAYE

After nearly a decade as a member of the Vancouver Talmud Torah board, and co-president from 2005-07, Ari Shiff has changed the way the education game is played in this city.

“Whatever environment you’re in, people find it hard to anticipate that this isn’t how it will be forever,” said Shiff, father of five, husband, investor, sportsman, collector and Ivy League- educated architect. While Vancouver’s day school options have grown along with the community, the overall system was languishing. It was going to take a pragmatist with vision to see opportunity in a recovering economy and, being an investor, Shiff had a lot of experience.

As a beneficiary of a day school education, Shiff was also familiar with education-related issues and became involved with VTT after his eldest child had been a student at the school for a few years.

“I’m from Toronto, so when we moved to Vancouver, my wife ... Carla [Van Messel] came to me and said, ‘Where should we send her?’ I said, ‘Well, where did you go?’ And, she said, ‘VTT,’ and I said, ‘You seem OK, so let’s send her there.’ That was literally about how much attention I gave it at the time. I think typical [for a] father, right?”

However, Shiff soon noticed that their expectations were not being met. “All the things that Carla remembered about the school didn’t seem to exist anymore. She had happy memories about the Chanukah concert and about music classes and this and that – and none of that seemed to exist, and I didn’t really understand why. In the meantime, Reisa Schwartzman, who was the president at the time, immediately started on me to join the board.”

Shiff recounted, “We are very committed to Jewish education, there was never any question that our kids would go all the way through.... I figured, if we were going to be there for that length of time, we were going to have to do something to make sure this was the kind of school we actually wanted to hang out in.... So, eventually, I acquiesced and I joined the board of VTT.”

Shiff was immediately greeted with a crisis. “My very first board meeting – the Diamonds are about to walk away from their offer of the land next to Oakridge for a high school because we haven’t come back to them yet with any proposal of what we’re going to do to make this new school happen. A little bell went off in my head. On my first date with Carla in Toronto, I asked her to tell me about herself [and] I kind of listened with half an ear,” Shiff joked. When she shared her experience of moving from one high school to another, in Vancouver and abroad, Shiff said, “I thought, we can’t let [the high school] slip out of our hands.”

When the chance came to lead the project, Shiff didn’t hesitate. “I perhaps stupidly put up my hand and said, ‘OK, I’ll take this on.’ Needless to say, everyone else on the board looked at me sideways, saying, you know, ‘Who is this guy? This is his first board meeting – didn’t he get the memo? You’re not supposed to volunteer for anything!’”

Though financial commitments were lined up, the campaign kept “running into roadblocks,” Shiff recalled. “The whole idea of Jewish high school education was so new to Vancouver that people didn’t know what they were missing by not having it.... What we did was to change the debate from ‘Would you send your kids to the school?’ to ‘Do you think this is a necessary resource to have in the city of Vancouver?’ And that, of course, changed everything.”

Soon, Shiff turned his attention back to VTT. “I very quickly realized that almost everything that could break at VTT was broken.... They were sitting there at every meeting and wringing their hands and saying, ‘Well, we need this many dollars or we’re going to be broke and how do we do it?’ And I put up my hand and said, ‘Well, how did we do it last year? How did we do it the year before?’”

Shiff said he “went to work with a dedicated ‘band of crazies’ and we rebuilt the school piece by piece.” He explained that they also changed the focus of the school: “The school was trying to make itself popular by making itself populist.... I looked at this and thought, we’re looking at parents, and Jewish parents in particular. Jewish parents always want the best for their schools – for their kids – so, they’re not going to send their kids to a school that’s good enough, they’re going to want their kids to go to the best school their kid can possibly get into.” The challenge, explained Shiff, was to create enough support so that every student would be able to excel with the curriculum. This was achieved with the help of many community partners, as well as the work of then co-principals Cathy Lowenstein and Donna Palmer-Dodds. (Lowenstein is now sole principal.)

“What we ended up creating was a school that could support the full spectrum of the community,” said Shiff. “You know, the motto was always that we would support any child regardless of need. I think, in the original draft, that meant, regardless of financial need, but it has come to mean, regardless of financial or learning needs.”

These days, Shiff is satisfying some of his natural tendency to solve problems through his work as president of a private hedge fund.

“I really love complicated puzzles and the real similarity between the three, working with VTT, architecture and the hedge fund stuff – you’ve got this data set that’s enormous, disparate pieces that look like they have no logical connection and yet they all have to work together somehow in order to get the final result. With architecture, it’s obvious – to make the building stand up and look beautiful, you’ve got to have all these many pieces work together. With the school, there were all these different pieces that, if they didn’t move forward simultaneously, couldn’t move forward at all. I couldn’t raise donor dollars unless I was simultaneously improving the quality of the school.... The hedge fund thing is the same kind of thing. When you read the papers, it seems like chaos, things going on all over the world, all the time. My job is to read the paper and figure out, OK, how is this going to effect this market and how is this going to effect that market and how am I and my investors [going to] capitalize on this opportunity.”

At the time of the financial crash, Shiff said, “We were amazed at the time that more people weren’t looking ahead.... You could invest in anything and it would go up. There was no differentiation happening between good assets and bad. When you have things like that happening, it’s obvious that people have just gone stupid and you have to just stand aside because things are going to come tumbling down. I did the same thing in the early 2000s with the dot-com crash.”

Though he describes himself as quiet and shy, Shiff is stepping out to effect change. “I’ve learned by becoming co-president at VTT that there were some things that I could accomplish by coming in front of the curtain that I could not accomplish behind the curtain. Some things could be done much faster. Surprisingly for me, because I’m very iconoclastic, for some people, it matters whether they’re talking to the president or just a board member.”

Shiff is convinced that VTT’s Ease the Squeeze campaign, which plans to create a Jewish campus on Oak between 26th and 28th, will be a watershed for the community. Many people have told him that Vancouver would never change, Shiff said. “They just didn’t understand that by having a high school in town, you’ve allowed Jewish professionals to settle in town because they don’t have to leave when their kids reach high school age. Not only that, but you’re attracting a whole different class of Jewish professionals because Jewish professionals, like anybody else, would love to live in Vancouver if there’s a possibility of their kids being educated all the way through high school. So, just having a high school would allow this city to flourish and nobody believed it was going to happen, except, of course, for people who had lived in cities where that had happened.”

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