Support Palestinian& Jewish Youth Leaders in Jaffa

In September 2017, we began our project year with Community in Action. Community in Action (CiA) is a volunteering and leadership development project for young Palestinian and Jewish high school graduates and university students. The project creates a cadre of young, committed, bi-national activists and leaders who have the tools, knowledge, and capability to promote socio-political change, and to work toward manifesting their vision of a just society.

We began this project year with 17 CiA participants who spent the first week engaging with uni-national education. Uni-national work, which is practiced throughout the year, refers to programming in which participants work within their nationality (Jewish or Palestinian). Dialogue, discussion, and activities are later discussed again in a bi-national framework. The purpose of uni-national work is to build up the participant's confidence and comfort within their own identity, so as to begin to think critically about their society and roles within it. Participants began to volunteer as tutors in schools in Jaffa with students aged 6-17. In their first educational seminar of the year, students traveled to Haifa where they learned about both the Jewish and Palestinian historical narratives there. This session was also used as a way for the participants to get to know each other on a deeper level and to set group expectations for the year.

This year, we successfully hosted our first educational conference, 'Identity: from Margins to Mainstream,' which had a turnout of over 100 people, including 40 teachers and educators, who was our primary target for the event. Conversations focused on how only one main narrative is taught in schools, causing many to feel isolated. Solutions focused on how to increase the discourse around different identities in the country so as create a more equal environment within the education system.

As per Sadaka-Reut style, we made sure to incorporate all those present. After the main speakers finished, we held roundtables facilitated by Sadaka-Reut alumni and staff members, in which people could share their experiences and suggest practical solutions. We received particularly good feedback about this aspect and many said they would have liked to continue for longer. We ended with a panel that focused on solutions, including Sadaka-Reut's work and of other partner organization working within the education system.