Achvat Amim End of Year Campaign - Becca's Page

As May turns into June, Omer to Sivan, Spring to Summer - no matter the month or season, at Achvat Amim, we build a learning community that questions, grows, and commits to justice together.

This past year, your support made Achvat Amim's vision of education grounded in solidarity and relationship building a reality. In 2024, your donations provided 32 participants with one-of-a-kind educational and leadership building experiences: tours of Lifta with Zochrot, work days in Masafer Yatta, Ruchani Study with Dr Shaiya Rothberg, trips to Battir and the Gaza Envelope, workshops alongside leading scholars, activists, and human rights organizations, all which build a community that asks: how does questioning the way power works empower us to unlearn systems of domination, and practice relations of reciprocity in their place?

Today, our Spring Cohort of 12 participants from Germany, Switzerland, Brazil, Israel, the United States, and Canada wraps up a beautiful semester of learning and growing. They've done protective presence in the Jordan Valley and Masafer Yatta, joined the Standing Together Humanitarian Guard on Jerusalem Day and at the Gaza border, packed food boxes with Rabbis for Human Rights to support emergency food aid in the West Bank, and committed to putting their education into action.

Many of our participants tell us that before joining our program, they did not know how to put their values of social justice into action. Our educational curriculum not only opens the difficult conversations, the social and historical learning needed to contextualizes this Land and its People - it provides an infrastructure to enter into genuine solidarity and build collective action.

From the bottom of our hearts, thank you for making spaces like these possible. It is the foundation on which we build a better world, together.

We need your continued support to sustain these spaces.

These spaces sustain initiatives like the Storytelling Project - South Hebron Hills, where Achvat Amim alumni and participants work alongside the residents of Masafer Yatta to build media training, English-language education, and more. From its first cohort with our partners Basel, Hamdan, Ali, and Awdah, who then went on to produce No Other Land, to now, we have continued to nourish an infrastructure that is able to bring new activists into sustained relationships in Masafer Yatta, and in turn, learn from the practices of sumud and reciprocity that sustain over a decade of partnership building in the face of Occupation and destruction.

Please continue to share and donate to our program, and help make this work possible. Our communities depend on it.

In just a month, we'll be expecting 12 more participants from Turkey, the US, Canada, and England to join us on the ground for 5 weeks of intensive solidarity building and education. While security risks and war made programming more challenging than ever, our participants reminded us that solidarity does not take breaks. Your donations last year sustained us through this challenging period, and we need your help to create a sustainable foundation on which education can grow.

Looking at testimonials from our Winter Program, here's what some participants had to say:

"The program made it possible to build trust with individuals and have tough conversations more quickly. The facilitation, peer authenticity, and generosity, was unparalleled. It also brought many folks who I have not actually heard from on past trips before, like Palestinian communities from East Jerusalem and the West Bank, even on “progressive” trips where they may have been mentioned but were not invited to the conversation. Here, we actually got to meet, sit down, talk, and build a relationship."

"I really appreciated that we were given space to think freely. It didn't feel like propaganda or indoctrination, just exposure to ideas and people and freedom to make meaning of it for ourselves. Achvat Amim is a a chance to connect and learn with Jews from around the United States and the world who are wrestling with the same big questions about Israel, Palestine, Peace, Justice and Hope. The cohort based experience creates a safe community to challenge yourself, question your assumptions, and take concrete collective action toward a more hopeful future for everyone who calls the land home."

"First program that I’ve done that had a focus on the Occupation, and had a space for criticism of the Israeli state. I loved being welcomed into the activist scene, being able to meet people in this work, being able to sit down for dinner together or celebrate Christmakkah, and especially Shabbat meals. I thought that both the educational and volunteering components were done extraordinarily well, and the program exceeded my expectations."

Winter Program alumni are doing amazing things - organizing events with JStreet Brown, Let's Complicate at Bard University, and more, showing us the longterm impact programming has on leadership and community building. Our participants show us just how how far education goes beyond the end of the program.

We are proud to be supported by donors like you, who join is in pursuit of self-determination for all peoples in the place they call home. Thank you for all that you do to make this work possible.

Yours in solidarity,

Achvat Amim