$20 million gift from Hecktman family turns Sunrise Day Camp into the spark for local JCC name change
JCC Chicago’s new $20 million naming gift from the Hecktman Family did not begin with a formal proposal or a glossy campaign.
It began, instead, with a chance introduction at Morton’s The Steakhouse in downtown Chicago, when JCC Chicago president and CEO Addie Goodman was having a pre-dinner drink with a lay leader and was introduced to his friend, Jeffrey Hecktman, founder, chairman, and CEO of Hilco Global.
The conversation quickly landed on a shared concern: the future of the Standard Club, a historic private Jewish social and business club that both were trying to help save from closing.
Their efforts could not prevent the club’s eventual closure in 2020, but the connection between Goodman and Hecktman took root and deepened over time.
In early 2022, Goodman invited Hecktman to breakfast, and his daughter, Hillary, joined them.
By then, Hillary was stepping into the role of executive director of the Hecktman Family Foundation, and Jeffrey had urged her to find mentors as she assumed more responsibility for the family’s philanthropy.
Goodman arrived at breakfast with several ideas in mind. She mentioned a major teen initiative and the “Violins of Hope” project, which would bring to JCC Chicago a collection of restored violins once owned by Jewish musicians before and during the Holocaust.
The father and daughter listened with interest, but their reactions were measured. Then Goodman described her vision for a Sunrise Day Camp in Chicago, a free day camp for children with cancer and their siblings, modeled on successful programs elsewhere in the United States.
The tone shifted immediately.
Hillary, who had worked as a pediatric oncology nurse in several local hospitals before joining the family foundation, responded at once. Here was a project that matched her professional life with her emerging leadership in philanthropy.
Within two months, the Hecktman family committed a first major gift to JCC Chicago: $1 million over three years to help launch Sunrise Day Camp, including a $500,000 3‑to‑1 matching grant to attract additional donors.
For Hillary, Sunrise was not just a line item in a grants budget.
She joined the JCC board, lent her clinical expertise to the camp, worked on capital needs and programming, and spent summers on-site as an oncology nurse, seeing how families experienced the camp day-to-day.
As her involvement grew, so did her appreciation for the institution itself. JCC Chicago operates in one of the largest Jewish communities in the United States, with studies ranking the Chicago metropolitan area as having the third- or fourth-largest Jewish population nationally.
Unlike many JCCs built around membership-based campuses, JCC Chicago’s model is decentralized. Its fitness membership program accounts for only a small portion of its roughly $50 million annual budget; the bulk of its work takes place across a network of six early childhood centers, eight day camps, an overnight camp, Sunrise Day Camp, the JCC Chicago Jewish Film Festival, Jewish high school clubs in 25 secular schools, Shabbat and Jewish learning programs, and a range of senior services.
Much of this programming is offered free or at low cost and is underwritten by philanthropy, which means that the institution’s ability to innovate and expand is directly tied to donor support.
Hillary, whose own child attended JCC day camp at Apache Village in Northbrook, began to see how far the J truly reached. She urged the organization to consolidate Jewish theater and sports activities, which had been scattered across different venues, under the JCC umbrella to create a central gathering place for Jewish youth.
Over the years, she and Goodman built a close working relationship that blurred the lines between donor, advisor, and partner. “We became pretty close,” Hillary later recalled. “It was really fun and easy to partner with Addie, because she was enjoying the idea of how to build and optimize this agency locally.”
The idea of a naming gift surfaced at what was supposed to be a routine budget meeting in January. Goodman, Jeffrey, and Hillary gathered to look ahead to the coming year, including the fourth season of Sunrise Day Camp, which is expected to welcome more than 130 children with cancer and their siblings this summer.
As the meeting wound down, Goodman raised a new proposal she had been considering for years: naming the JCC in honor of Jeffrey and his wife, Penny. A naming opportunity of that magnitude, she believed, was one of the most significant in American Jewish life, particularly for a 123‑year‑old institution that had never before borne a donor’s name.
When Goodman floated the idea, the room fell quiet. Hillary remembers her father listening intently. At first, the scale of the ask seemed far beyond the family’s philanthropic budget. “My dad is a very intentional listener, and initially, it was way outside of our projected budget,” she said, thinking privately that the timing might not be right.
Goodman, drawing on years of relationship-building, chose to speak directly. Many organizations, she told Jeffrey, would be seeking his support. Given his success, there would “be a long line of folks interested in your philanthropy,” and she hoped that when he considered all his options, “Jewish” would be at the very top of his list.
Something clicked. “I think it is important for a Jewish name to be boldly philanthropic,” Jeffrey responded. In the weeks that followed, the Hecktman Family Foundation agreed to make a $20 million naming gift to JCC Chicago, the largest grant the foundation has ever given and the largest gift in the JCC’s history.
The contribution will rename the organization the Penny and Jeffrey Hecktman Family JCCs of Chicago and establish an endowment intended to “fuel Jewish engagement across Illinois” for generations to come.
Inside the J, there was initial excitement about what such a windfall might make possible right away. But Goodman and her team quickly concluded that this particular gift had to be treated differently.
“People’s first inclination was to spend the money,” she acknowledged, but she argued that a once‑in‑a‑century naming gift for a 123‑year‑old institution should be preserved as long‑term capital.
“We are a 123-year-old organization. We are unnamed. We will be named one time. So this $20 million investment is really fuel for the future.” The endowment will allow the JCC to “quadruple down on Jewish engagement,” as Goodman puts it, by using the annual draw to expand existing programs and pilot new initiatives while protecting the principal for future generations.
Over the coming months, the new name and identity will begin appearing across the JCC’s footprint. JCC Chicago has said that its online platforms will transition to the Hecktman branding over a five‑month period, while summer camp T‑shirts, staff name badges, and signage will debut the revised logo and name as materials are updated.
For families who already use JCC programs, the day‑to‑day experience will look familiar, but the institution’s leaders see the new name as a statement about the future: a visible, local family choosing to publicly align its philanthropy with Jewish community life.
The timing matters. Across North America, Jewish institutions are rethinking their strategies in the face of demographic change, evolving patterns of affiliation and the aftershocks of major geopolitical events.
Research on Jewish giving shows that younger donors, in particular, are looking for more hands‑on engagement, greater transparency and measurable impact. Hillary’s trajectory—from pediatric oncology nurse to foundation executive, board member and on‑the‑ground volunteer at Sunrise Day Camp—captures that shift. She did not simply sponsor a program; she embedded herself in it.
Local communal leaders see the Hecktman gift as an opportunity to rethink what a JCC can be for the next generation. Lonnie Nasatir, president of the Jewish United Fund and Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago, has described the endowment as a catalyst.
The additional resources, he has said, will allow the JCC to think more creatively about how to engage different parts of the community, with a particular emphasis on younger adults and families who may not see themselves reflected in traditional institutional life.
With more flexible capital to test new approaches, the hope is that “every generation,” as Nasatir put it, will be able to engage differently, and that more people will ultimately choose to live active Jewish lives in Chicago.
For the Hecktman family, the decision to say yes was both public and deeply personal. Hillary recalls the moment her father agreed to the naming gift as a point of pride. “It is all about enriching the lives of Jewish people, Jewish adults, Jewish children, all throughout Chicago,” she said. Investing in the place where their family lives and works, she added, “seems like a slam dunk for the family,” a way to plant roots even more firmly in the city and watch “over time how that blossoms.”
She and Goodman both hope that the high‑profile gift will inspire other Jewish families to think more ambitiously about supporting Jewish institutions at a time of heightened need.
As Goodman has framed it, the Hecktman decision is an example of Jewish philanthropists choosing to “give Jewishly” when it matters, placing Jewish communal life near the top of their philanthropic priorities.
The partnership between the family and the JCC, Hillary said, is meant to be long-term. “We hope this will be a long-term partnership for the city of Chicago—that the city can count on the family to invest in Jewish people.”
Behind the headlines and the naming rights, the story is also about the slow work of relationship-building.
A chance meeting at a steakhouse, a shared but ultimately unsuccessful effort to save an old-line club, a breakfast conversation that surfaced a project uniquely suited to a next-generation donor’s professional and personal passions—each step helped create the trust and mutual understanding that made a $20 million decision possible years later.
For fundraisers who often talk about “friendraising” as much as fundraising, JCC Chicago’s experience with the Hecktman family offers a living example of how that philosophy can play out, not in a single campaign cycle, but across the arc of a partnership.