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Castro leaving Jewish Family Service after 35 years

Paul Castro, the president and CEO of Jewish Family Service of Los Angeles (JFS) who has worked at the social service agency for more than 35 years, has announced his retirement, effective December 2017.
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November 3, 2016

Paul Castro, the president and CEO of Jewish Family Service of Los Angeles (JFS) who has worked at the social service agency for more than 35 years, has announced his retirement, effective December 2017.

The 64-year-old L.A. native’s story is not that of the typical leader of a Jewish nonprofit — starting with the fact that he is not Jewish. Of Mexican descent and raised Catholic, Castro’s first home was in Watts. He lived there through the violence of the 1965 Watts riots. 

The riots were enough to convince his mother and father, a painter on a maintenance crew who earned his high school equivalency certificate when Castro was in college at Cal State Fullerton, to move the family to Whittier. Castro graduated with a bachelor’s degree in ethnic studies and earned a law degree from Loyola Law School, though the self-described social activist never took the bar exam.

 “Time passes and you don’t do it,” Castro said during an interview in his Koreatown office. 

He began working at JFS in 1980 after he responded to an advertisement. The organization had been a Jewish counseling agency, before public funding expanded its scope of work, and Castro’s first position with JFS focused on state funding for keeping seniors home instead of in nursing homes, which was right up his alley. 

 “In my culture, we don’t send grandparents to nursing homes,” Castro said.

The organization at that time was headquartered on Fairfax Avenue, at the Freda Mohr Multipurpose Center. The area felt like the Lower East Side of New York, Castro said, with bubbes pushing baby strollers and chickens hanging from the windows of kosher butcher shops. He’d never seen anything like it. The sights, he said, were “alien” to him.  

The JFS budget was $2 million when Castro began working there. Today it exceeds $30 million. The organization, like many others, endured difficult times, particularly during the recession from 2008 to 2011, he said, but it has managed to continue providing help to the hungry, the elderly, Holocaust survivors and others.

Castro, who was appointed CEO in 2001, said some of his experiences at JFS that have most shaped his worldview are professional trips to Israel as well as interactions with Holocaust survivors, who receive home care through JFS and social support through its Café Europa initiative. Not being Jewish never got in the way of him thriving at JFS, he said.

 “Almost from the day I got there, to the agency, it wasn’t about Jews helping Jews, although that happens. It was really about Jews feeling responsible for the greater community, as well, to the extent they can be useful and helpful and have impact,” Castro said. “I never felt I was not part of that thinking. I felt from Day One that I was part of that and the community has always made me comfortable with that idea.” 

Immediately after Castro became CEO, JFS, a beneficiary agency of The Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles that serves approximately 100,000 people every year, assumed responsibility over key Jewish Community Center (JCC) services, including what is now known as the SOVA Community Food and Resource Program, the Israel Levin Senior Adult Center and the Westside JCC’s Social Day Care Center for seniors and people with disabilities. John Fishel, Federation president at the time, said Castro displayed strong leadership abilities.

 “First of all, he’s accessible. If we had an issue and wanted to talk about something that was service related or organizational, [or about] relationships, he was always ready to do it,” Fishel said. “I found him to be one of the real professional leaders in our organized Jewish community and I have nothing but wonderful things to say about him.” 

The JFS leader, who announced his retirement on Oct. 13, said his work isn’t finished. Castro hopes to raise the additional funds needed to begin the rebuilding of the Freda Mohr Multipurpose Center, which will become the JFS Lois and Richard Gunther Center. It will house the organization’s administrative offices and consolidate much of its outreach work into a single location. Of the $25 million needed for the project, $17 million has been raised, he said. 

Additionally, he will assist with the organization’s national search for his successor. Joining the board eventually is a possibility, but he does not plan to do that immediately out of the belief that the new CEO needs space to implement his or her own vision. He cited the example of his predecessor, Sandra King — who appears in a framed photo in Castro’s office along with Castro and King’s predecessor, Arnold Saltzman — who waited a decade after her retirement before joining the board.

 “One of the things I know from experience with my conversations with my colleagues who have agencies like mine is that when a new CEO comes in, you need to give him space. I don’t know if I would necessarily stay involved in things; I would stay a few steps back, let the new person establish themselves,” Castro said.

What’s next for him includes spending time with his four granddaughters and moving to Northern California with his wife, Nikki Cavalier, clinical assistant professor in field education at the USC Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work and former director of the JFS Freda Mohr Multipurpose Center — the two met while working together at JFS.

He said the decision to leave is bittersweet.

 “I’m not sure how that will feel,” he said of his forthcoming final day. “But I think I’ll look back and feel like my work and my life have a lot of meaning because of my tenure at JFS.”

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