Support Palestinian& Jewish Youth Leaders in Jaffa

It is the beginning of another year of bi-national education and activism at Sadaka-Reut. Like every year, new members joined our team of coordinators and facilitators and began to work together in order to empower new groups of youth and young adults to pursue the change they wish to see in their communities and societies.

According to Sadaka-Reut's Theory of Change, the transformation of the individual begins when she or he becomes more aware of their own identity and surroundings. This theory applies not only to our participants, but also to our staff. We know that successful facilitators' training greatly contributes to the success of our different programs.

Therefore, in October, old and new members of our team met together for the first time for two busy days of staff development, where they got to know each other personally and politically while engaging in workshops surrounding the current political climate, media biases, gender, and groups in society. Other workshops were more practical, requiring the team to deal with challenging case studies that they might need to deal with throughout the year, based on the organisation's past experience.

In our Community in Action program, the new Jewish and Palestinian participants started meeting for their weekly learning days in September. The first few meetings focused on introductions: participants were introduced to their coordinators and to each other, but also to Sadaka-Reut, its staff, and the Jaffa surroundings. They received training in preparation for a year of volunteering at schools in Jaffa, including on interactions with young students and specific measures of child protection.

In November, participants embarked on their first self-led tour of Jaffa, with each pair conducting research on one geographical point, its history, and what can be learned from it, and then sharing the lessons they learned with the rest of the group as they passed through each stop. The tour was informative and enriching for everyone involved, and will be followed by a few more. As they began their volunteering at four different schools in Jaffa – and, for the first time, also at the South Tel Aviv Levinsky Garden library, volunteering with migrant youth – participants are already well on their way to becoming involved and active members of their communities.

Thank you all for making it happen!

Along with Sadaka-Reut's other programs, Community in Action participants concluded their activity year in June. They chose to celebrate the end of their journey together with a binational, bilingual public Spoken Word event that was held under the theme of social and political struggles. In the event, local artists were invited to present written pieces related to personal or collective experiences of oppression and protest. Topics ranged from different forms of systemic discrimination to civil non-violent protest.

This initiative grew out of the experience of one of the Palestinian group participants, who is also a member of a spoken word poetry group outside the program. Following the recent Gaza protests, she wrote and planned to perform a piece that included a line dealing directly with this subject, but the spoken word group's coordinator refused to allow it and demanded that she remove that line from the piece. When she refused, she was prevented from getting on stage and performing at their event. Once this participant told some of the others in the Sadaka-Reut group about what happened, they came up with the idea of holding this event in solidarity, to highlight this form of art as space to create social and political change.

Throughout the year, our participants volunteered with students at schools in Jaffa. During the last period of the activity year, they also summarized their experiences. The following are some feedbacks we received from the participants:

"We worked a lot this year on History and I think they began to see the material more critically and to understand that it is sometimes presented in a tendentious way"

"I witnessed my students gain self-confidence. Every meeting I would ask them to tell me about their week. They would tell me and I would show an interest and ask questions and it made them feel that someone cared about what they were going through"

"Everything is connected. The critical perspective I have developed throughout the year passed on to my students without me even intending to. My understanding of power dynamics and my place as a Jewish volunteer in an Arab school comes from our learning days and influences the way I tutor and treat the students"

We wish our recent program graduates the best for the future, and thank you all again for supporting this program and our the Sadaka-Reut vision!