Andi Milens, whose career has led her to help Jews around the world, has retired from Jewish professional life.
She concluded her nearly 30-year career at the end of February, stepping down from her most recent position as chief strategy officer of Jewish Federation of Greater Kansas City.
Milens, the daughter of Michael (z”l) and Sharon Milens, credits her parents for shaping her values and her involvement in Jewish life. She became a bat mitzvah and was confirmed at Congregation Beth Shalom, and she said that Judaism “was always an important part of who we were.”
“None of [my Jewish professional career] would have happened if it hadn’t been for my childhood here,” Milens said. “This is the community that taught me to go in that direction.”
During her youth, Milens became actively involved in pushing for the freedom of oppressed Jews in the Soviet Union — a turning point in her perspective of Jewish unity.
“[I learned that] in the end, we’re the Jewish community,” she said. “Maybe every generation has to learn it — in my growing up, Soviet Jewry was a hugely formative experience for me, and now it’s a history lesson… we rely on that history that gets us through the next [crisis].”
After applying to multiple colleges, a visit to her friend at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, led her to enroll in 1988. She studied psychology and Jewish and Near Eastern studies but credits her involvement with the school’s Hillel as what influenced her to become a Jewish professional.
In 1990, Milens went to study in Israel, arriving on the day that Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. The tension and instability that spread through the Middle East caused her parents to worry about her immensely, and additional school and safety circumstances ultimately led her to return to the U.S. Despite this, Milens maintains a strong affinity for Israel and has since visited many times.
Upon graduating college, Milens briefly returned to Kansas City and led the “Kansas City Israel Pilgrimage” together with future Federation CEO Jay Lewis. In 1993, she began studying for her two master’s degrees in Los Angeles — one in public administration from the University of Southern California, and one in Jewish communal service from Hebrew Union College.
Milens’ first job as a Jewish professional was at the Jewish Federation of Cleveland, Ohio, during which she discovered and developed her passion to help facilitate aid to those in need.
“That’s what my job has always been — being the person behind the scenes, helping the other people [help those in need],” Milens said. “I think I like being able to empower those people to do the thing but also know that what I was doing made a difference to the person on the receiving end.”
Milens saw the impact of the work she helped facilitate firsthand during the Yugoslav Wars of the late 1990s, when the Cleveland Jewish community helped resettle a family of Albanian Muslim refugees. She was there upon their arrival and saw the extent with which the organizations she worked with treated the refugees with care and dignity amid a mob of press at the airport.
“I watched this whole episode, from them getting off the plane to the fact that we, the Jewish community, brought this Albanian Muslim family from a refugee camp, and we brought them to Cleveland, and we put them in a home, and we handed them cash… there were not a lot of experiences that intense,” Milens said, noting that she felt strong emotions when she realized the check they were handed had been authorized by her.
In 2002, she relocated to New York City to work for the Jewish Council for Public Affairs (JCPA), where she spent 13 years. Her job largely focused on supporting local Jewish community relations professionals, which played a notably significant role in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
Although she enjoyed her work and living in New York, she eventually found herself missing the feeling of a tight-knit community — she told The Chronicle in 2017 that her work included “working one-on-one with communities,” influencing her desire to return to community-level efforts.
“After a while, when it was time to find something new, I kind of missed that community thing,” she said. “And if I’m going to leave New York and work for a community, it might as well be in my community.”
Milens was hired by Jewish Federation of Greater Kansas City in 2017, working her way up to chief strategy officer in 2023.
“When I first moved to Kansas City and started with Jewish Federation, it was Andi who helped me understand the landscape of Jewish Kansas City and build connections across this community,” said Sierra Debrow, Federation community planning specialist formerly supervised by Milens. “Her deep connection to this community showed me how incredibly intertwined and special this community is and can be. I admire her strong commitment to making this community the best that it can be, with one foot rooted in the past and the other stepping into a bright future.”
“It is so phenomenal that Andi was able to channel her passions for the Jewish community into a long and distinguished professional career,” said Jay Lewis, president and CEO of Federation. “ From fighting for justice locally to sustaining Jewish life in Israel and throughout the world, Andi’s impact was felt in so many ways. The Jewish community is so fortunate that Andi worked on its behalf for so many years, and I am so fortunate to have worked with Andi at the beginning of her career when we co-led the Kansas City Israel Pilgrimage and now at the end of her career at the Jewish Federation.”
Having seen the breadth of Jewish community across the world during her career, Milens retains a confidence in the future of Jewry on every level, from Federation to the Kansas City Jewish community to the entire world.
“Sometimes I’m optimistic, and sometimes I’m hopeful, and not always at the same time,” she said. “There’s a lot of work to do, and I don’t by any stretch mean to minimize the danger that is out there from antisemitism and the danger of extremism… but I really do have faith that we will find the right path and emerge as well or better.”
As for why she is choosing to retire at age 54, Milens said that she wants to make room for new young leaders.
“I see the next generation of professionals, and I have great confidence in their abilities and their ideas and their energy,” she said. “I don’t want to be the one who’s sticking around at the end of my career, not making room for the next generation.”
Though retiring from Jewish professional life, Milens does not plan to retreat from the Jewish community.
“I’m really looking forward to figuring out what the rest of my Jewish life looks like,” she said.
