it's all in how you say it
Feb. 25th, 2003 10:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cellioA fellow congregant called and asked me to be on the steering committee (read: board) of the sisterhood.
What I thought: Having a sisterhood (and brotherhood) is anathema to an egalitarian congregation. If we say that men and women don't have assigned roles, why on earth would I want to help perpetrate an organization that tries to go backwards by (re-)assigning those roles? It's not like our sisterhood and brotherhood are trying to move past conventional gender roles -- the women handle babysitting during services and serve cookies and coffee afterwards, and the men hold barbeques and talks by investment bankers. Feh! I want none of it! And not just because babysitting and serving coffee aren't my thing! There's a higher principle here. How can I help you see this?
What I said: I'm flattered, but no.
What I thought: Having a sisterhood (and brotherhood) is anathema to an egalitarian congregation. If we say that men and women don't have assigned roles, why on earth would I want to help perpetrate an organization that tries to go backwards by (re-)assigning those roles? It's not like our sisterhood and brotherhood are trying to move past conventional gender roles -- the women handle babysitting during services and serve cookies and coffee afterwards, and the men hold barbeques and talks by investment bankers. Feh! I want none of it! And not just because babysitting and serving coffee aren't my thing! There's a higher principle here. How can I help you see this?
What I said: I'm flattered, but no.
Re: or... you could work to change it...
Date: 2003-02-28 09:46 am (UTC)What's with that, anyway? We have the same sort of situation -- the brotherhood and sisterhood make annual contributions to the synagogue, and hold fund-raising activities throughout the year to support that. But we're all the same congregants! So the synagogue asks me for money, and the sisterhood asks me for money, and the endowment campaign asks me for money, and various other special interests ask me for money, all of which ends up in the synagogue coffers. Are there really people who give more money if it's carved up that way? I don't; I decide how much the synagogue is getting this year, and I usually just pay it directly, and I don't do the secondary fund drives. And I don't see myself as shirking some sort of obligation to the sisterhood; it's that I already gave at the office, so to speak.
(I guess I'm not the only one who thinks like this, because last year we kicked off an endowment campaign and this year the number of "above and beyond" dues contributions went down. What surprises me is that this surprised some other board members.)
Fundraising models are one of the hardest things for me to understand about synagogue life...