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Back in the late 1990s and early aughts, one of my responsibilities at the Jewish Federation of Detroit was oversight of a program we called the “volunteer draft.” Staff and volunteer leaders sat together and looked closely at every committee in the Federation system and its supported agencies, and suggested candidates for open roles. We tried to think about what each governing body really needed. More women? They certainly needed younger people on that committee! Someone with a legal background? Fundraising? A marketing and communications mind?

For a while, we held an annual draft. Open positions were posted around a room, and dozens of leaders walked around sticking Post-it notes with names on the committees and boards. Not everyone was nominated, but it let all of us think creatively about skills, matches, and community needs.

The other side of that work was meeting people, getting to know their interests and skills, and thinking about where they might fit. It’s one reason people often tell me, “You know everyone!” (Spoiler: I don’t.) Since then, I’ve sat on many nominating and governance committees, always thinking about the who, where, and how.

I love this work. I think of it as matchmaking for the community-minded. Directly or indirectly, I’ve probably helped “draft” hundreds, if not thousands, of people into community life.

Now that I work for myself, I’ve had the chance to draft myself. I’ve joined a number of boards and committees. And then I faced an interesting question: Could I take what I’d learned in the nonprofit world and bring it to the civic one?

Organizing our local Run 4 Their Lives chapter helped me see that bridge. Bringing neighbors together each week, coordinating with police, making sure we gathered safely, walking and talking with old friends and new ones — it was communal work happening in civic space. I loved it, and I realized the line between the two was thinner than I’d thought.

I’ve lived in our tiny, idyllic village for 25 years. We’re small and surrounded by better-known suburbs. Our main attraction, the Cider Mill, isn’t even technically in the village. We walk the neighborhood almost daily and have come to know many of our neighbors – and if we don’t know them, we probably know their dog.

So when I was approached about running for the Franklin Village Council, I surprised myself, and Eddie too, when I said I’d give it serious thought. Now here I am, running for a four-year term as Franklin Village Trustee.

I believe it’s essential for minority communities to take part in civic life. There are fewer than 16 million Jews in the world, and we can’t afford to sit on the sidelines. Showing up locally, where decisions are made about the streets we walk and the neighbors we know, is one of the most direct ways to do it.

I hope to bring my experience in governance, budgeting, and community organizing to the place I already love. It feels like the next natural step.

To be clear, this isn’t a fundraising letter. (We’re a lean, mean, local organizing machine.) If you live in Franklin, yes, I’d love your vote. But mostly I’m sharing this as one more way to be engaged in community. And if you’re wondering about the philanthropy angle: if elected, I’ll donate my entire council salary to charity. (All $25 of it!)

After all those years of drafting others, it turns out the best match may be waiting close to home.

What do you already know or do that could take you somewhere new? I’m always here to listen, to talk it through, and help you. 

Shabbat Shalom,

Kari

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For most of my life, I’ve been considered “young.”

My parents had me when they were 40 and 33 — not old by today’s standards, but in 1972 that was practically geriatric! I was among the youngest kids in our Southfield neighborhood cohort. I was the youngest cousin on my dad’s side by many years. I was a young employee at the Federation. I received recognition early.

And I am among the youngest of the “second generation,” the children of Holocaust survivors. That one has always carried a different weight. Being young in that group means I’ll be able to tell my father’s story longer than most, and hand it to people who will never meet a survivor.

But I don’t always feel so young anymore. I’m nearly 54. I’ve worked my entire adult life. My kids are well on their way to full independence: They live elsewhere, working, and enjoying emerging adulthood.

And still, when I’m talking with people I consider peers, I often hear, “You’re just a baby!” It makes me laugh, and it makes me cringe. I probably should appreciate the nod to youth in midlife and accept it as the compliment it’s intended to be, but it can also feel like a brush-off. 

If you’ve spent any time on Instagram, you may have come across Recess Therapy, the series where kids on playgrounds are asked big questions about love, fear, and what makes a good friend. Their answers are hilarious, and they’re often wiser than anything I’d hear at a professional conference. We share the clips because they’re adorable. I wonder how often we stop to take them seriously.

The dismissal runs in both directions. But if I’m honest, in philanthropy it usually runs one way. We give enormous credence to age and experience, and we don’t always listen to the next generation.

About a decade ago, I was at a professional conference and saw a presentation that really stuck with me. It described how the Greatest Generation, the Silent Generation, and even Boomers were funding programs for young Gen Xers, Millennials, and the older edge of Gen Z. Those programs reflected two things: what the funders thought younger people would want, and what the funders themselves wanted for them. What was missing was what younger people actually wanted. The intentions were good. The listening wasn’t there.

I see smaller versions of this all the time around family tables. A grandparent’s giving priorities are treated as settled, and the grandchildren’s ideas are received with the same “that’s so cute.” Sometimes it goes the other way, and an elder’s hard-won perspective gets tuned out as old-fashioned. Either way, the family loses half its wisdom.

I think about this often in my Family Circles work. A circle usually comes together to remember or honor someone older: a grandfather’s lifelong love of music, a mother’s devotion to the neighborhood where she was raised. Their passions are the starting point. But part of the work is looking at those passions through the lens of today rather than yesterday. However rapidly the world is changing, human needs are pretty fixed. The school program Grandpa loved may no longer exist, but the need he cared about is still very real and looks different now. Honoring someone’s legacy doesn’t mean funding what they would have funded in 1975. It means asking what their values call for today. That question needs every generation seated at the same table to get the answer right.

Jewish tradition has a lovely image for this. Rabbi Meir teaches: Don’t look at the jug, look at what’s inside it. A new jug can hold old wine, and an old jug can hold nothing at all.

So when does one stop being young? When does one become wise? I’ve come to think these are the wrong questions. Each age has its own wisdom. The 25-year-old sees the world as it’s becoming. The 85-year-old has watched worlds come and go. And those of us in the middle, still being called “babies,” get to hold both, if we’re willing to listen in both directions.

So I’ll leave you with this: How old do you feel? And whose wisdom, older or younger, have you been overlooking?

Shabbat Shalom,

Kari

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Almost a year ago, as I was leaving my last job, I found myself in the virtual company of a small group of women who work in and around philanthropy. We started calling ourselves, half-jokingly, “the Philantherapists.” For most of the year since, we’ve mostly been names on a screen — only a few of whom I’d actually met.

So with the Purposeful Planning Institute Rendezvous – an intimate, premier conference for the many professional disciplines that help support ultra high net worth families – happening in Boulder, I flew out with the one Philantherapist attending whom I knew in real life. More of the group were headed there too, just people I hadn’t met in person yet. On the first night, six of us had dinner together. Lots of laughs, real questions, the kind of conversation that goes somewhere fast. Strangers on paper, familiar faces on a screen, but then, something else by dessert.

That dinner turned out to be a preview of how the whole conference unfolded. The facilitation by XChange was some of the best I’ve experienced: It moved you from one purposeful conversation with a single other person, into a small group, into the full room. And at every stage, you were genuinely in conversation, not just seated near one. There were reunions everywhere, old friends and colleagues finding each other again, but just as much new: new faces, new names, new thinking. It was welcoming and kind in a way that’s hard to manufacture. And it held two things at once that usually feel like a tension — real reverence for the people who built these disciplines over decades, and a sincere openness to whoever walked in this year with a new idea.

No politics, either. A small thing to name, maybe, but it was genuinely refreshing not to feel the low hum of it in the room, the way you almost always do lately. And nearly every presenter was also an attendee. The people teaching a session were sitting in the audience for the next one. No back-of-house, no separation between the people who “know” and the people who came to learn.

Philanthropy, it turned out, was only one of more than twenty disciplines represented at PPI — estate attorneys, therapists, family business consultants, filmmakers, wealth psychologists, coaches, all working inside families’ hardest conversations from different angles. And one word kept surfacing across every discipline, meaning something slightly different each time: trust. A trust is a legal document. Trust is also the thing that’s broken between siblings who haven’t spoken honestly in a decade. It’s the confidence a founder has to extend to the next generation, and the faith a family has to place in an advisor who’s about to ask them uncomfortable questions. Every conversation in that room was, in some sense, about trust — which document holds it, which relationship is missing it, and how you build more of it before you need it.

That’s where philanthropy earns its place. It’s one of the only reasons a family sits down together, generation after generation, and asks: What do we actually care about? Done well, giving isn’t a task alongside the family’s real work — it is the real work, wearing a more comfortable disguise. It’s a serious intervention for communication, unity, and shared purpose, dressed up as something everyone already wants to do. It lets people do good and feel good in the very same conversation.

I flew to Boulder knowing just a few people, and came home with the beginnings of many new friendships, a stack of new thinking, and a renewed sense of who and what my work is for.

So here’s what I keep sitting with: What would it look like if more families treated philanthropy not as a line item, but as the place where trust actually gets built — not just documented? And what’s stopping us, across all twenty-plus disciplines in that room, from saying that out loud more often? And as always, how can I help?

Shabbat Shalom,

Kari

Some of the Philantherapists at dinner at the beautiful Teahouse in Boulder.