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January 17, 2003
Yad B'Yad hires a new leader
New JFSA project will help address issues of poverty in the community.
KYLE BERGER REPORTER
Poverty relief in the Jewish community of Greater Vancouver has
a new co-ordinator who will bring experience from South Africa and
England to the job.
Larainne Kaplan has been selected by the Jewish Federation of Greater
Vancouver (JFGV) and the Jewish Family Service Agency (JFSA) to
fill the part-time position of outreach and liaison co-ordinator
of Yad B'Yad, the coalition on poverty in the Jewish community.
Her job, Kaplan explained, will be to continue the efforts already
undertaken by JFGV's director of planning David Berson and JFSA's
executive director Joseph Kahn Tietz.
Her responsibilities will include co-ordinating the coalition's
five working groups, developing relationships with various community
organizations and supporting new initiatives and ideas. However,
she explained, her most important role with Yad B'Yad will be to
raise awareness about the realities of poverty in the Jewish community.
"There are a lot of people in our community who don't actually
believe that poverty exists among Jewish people," she said.
"We have to keep the dialogue going about people who are living
on the margin."
Kaplan said she hopes a heightened sense of awareness about poverty
will lead to two things: a more inclusive community that enables
Jews living below the poverty line to be involved in their Jewish
life and more job opportunities made available to community members
who need them.
"It's very expensive to be Jewish in our community and we have
to make the Jewish community more inclusive to those who are living
on limited incomes," she said. "People who are less advantaged
have a hard time asking for things. We're all Jewish, we're all
part of the community and we all have to support each other."
Kaplan said she herself was helped by the local Jewish community
system; after moving to Vancouver from South Africa just five months
ago, she used the JFSA's Job Match program to secure her position
with Yad B'Yad.
In South Africa she worked in social developmental work and conflict
management, mainly with people in minority groups and impoverished
communities.
She also spent a year and a half in London, England, working in
the field of child protection. And, while visiting Vancouver for
a year in 1998, she volunteered with the Touchstone Parent-Teen
Mediation Centre and the Red Cross Society as part of her training
in conflict resolution and negotiation.
Yad B'Yad was formed after the community held a forum on poverty
in January 2001. The coalition consists of five working groups made
up of professional and lay leadership who focus on issues such as
employment, marketing and communications, health and housing, food
and nutrition, research and information, and advocacy.
At the time, organizers of the forum claim that one in six members
of the Vancouver Jewish community lives in poverty and that 12 per
cent of the community have a gross annual income of less than $20,000.
One of the next steps for Yad B'Yad is a mapping and mobilization
project that is being led by Melissa Tapper, on behalf of the research
and information working group.
Tapper will spend the next six months interviewing 50 people in
the Jewish community who are living on limited incomes to discuss
their feelings about various Jewish communal services. In order
to get a wide range of thoughts and opinions, she will speak both
to people who are involved in Jewish community programming, as well
as those who aren't.
The results of the report, Tapper hopes, will serve a variety of
purposes. She thinks the information will help Yad B'Yad develop
more outreach programs for people living below the poverty line,
and that it will help Jewish communal agencies figure out how well
existing programs are serving Jews on limited incomes and what changes
need to be made in order to include them.
"I think the biggest thing is to inform agencies on how to
modify their services to the expressed needs," she said. "I
think [the project] is a really important opportunity to hear from
people living on limited incomes and to meaningfully engage them.
I also want to give [the interviewees] the option to sit on a committee
within Yad B'Yad because I think it is important to have their voice
represented equally."
Tapper, who also works part-time at the JFSA as the community kitchen
co-ordinator, said she is still in the process of searching for
volunteers to be included in her report. Anyone interested in being
interviewed can call her at 604-257-5151 or e-mail her at [email protected].
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