2Life Communities, which provides high-quality, affordable housing for Greater Boston seniors, plans to raise the roof when it honors the 40-year career of Amy Schectman, the 2Life Communities’ Saul and Gitta Kurlat CEO, who is retiring in October.

The Brighton-based nonprofit has been providing affordable senior housing since 1965 and Schectman has led the organization for the past 16 years.

To honor her service, 2Life is raising $2.5 million to establish the Amy Schectman Director of Spiritual Care Endowment to help guide the spiritual needs of the thousands of seniors of all faiths living in 2Life communities in Newton, Brighton, Brookline, Waltham, Framingham and Devens.

New communities are in development in Lynn, and Mattapan.

The endowment’s launch will be part of 2Life’s “Raising the Roof” annual fundraising gala on Sept. 27 at the Omni Seaport Hotel in Boston.

“At the heart of spiritual care is supporting people to tap into their own internal spiritual resources and empowering them to use them so they can support themselves through times of challenge and suffering,” said Rabbi Giulia Fleishman, director of spiritual care, in a statement.

Schectman grew up in Stamford, Connecticut to parents who were mostly non-practicing but were Zionists, she said. Her bat mitzvah, she said, consisted of reading poems and singing songs, not reading from Torah.

In 1978, Schectman was a senior and a political science major at Johns Hopkins University. Her mother’s friend, Rabbi Joseph Ehrenkranz of Stamford’s Orthodox Congregation Agudath Sholom, invited her to participate in a delegation that met with then-Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and his cabinet in Cairo. They also traveled to Israel, where she visited the Knesset and met with many dignitaries.

“I got to Jerusalem and I started to sob in a way that I had no idea that that was inside me and why, but that was the moment when my journey changed and I was like, ‘I’m going to find out more about this stuff because this … clearly has some meaning to me,” Schectman said.

A majority of Schectman’s career has been in the public sector. After graduate school at MIT, she worked in the administration of former Gov. Michael Dukakis as director of capital budget and planning. She later worked as planning director at the Boston Housing Authority, as Brookline’s first economic development director, and as the state director of public housing and rental assistance.

In 2010, Schectman’s predecessor at 2Life – which was then called Jewish Community Housing for the Elderly (JCHE) – Ellen Feingold said she would be retiring and needed someone she loved and trusted to run the organization. Several board members reached out as well and were very influential in persauding her, she said.

“It made sense,” Schectman said, “because it was just yet another expression of tikkun olam.”

At the time she started, the organization was in a financially precarious position, something Schectman worked to bolster. In 2014, the organization launched its first strategic plan.

One of the plan’s goals was “that we should have a name that reflected the excitement we feel about our future.” The name became 2Life Communities in 2018.

At the time she started, there were three campuses with 1,000 apartments in Brighton and Newton. 2Life now has seven campuses. Its eighth campus is under construction and the organization is about to start construction on its ninth. Construction of the 150-apartment affordable senior housing Solimine House can be seen along Lynnfield Street in Lynn.

When Schectman arrived, she felt the organization lacked a spirituality component. A program to have a rabbinic intern at 2Life “was immediately and enormously successful and oversubscribed,” she said.

Around 2018, rabbinic intern Giulia Fleishman was doing a two-year internship when she noticed a lot of women residents felt sad they never had a chance to become a bat mitzvah. She proposed a yearlong study to give residents that chance. Schectman said more than 20 people went on to have one and the result “was a mind-blowing experience.”

When Fleishman was ordained as a rabbi from Hebrew College, she was hired as the spiritual care director. Now 2Life has a rabbi and two rabbinic interns from Hebrew College. Last year, it hired a minister.

Creating a director of spiritual care at 2Life is one of the things Schectman said she is most proud of in her 16 years at the organization, “because that will always provide a level of loving kindness and care that nothing else does.”