שתיל - שירותי תמיכה וייעוץ לקידום שינוי חברתי

The first environmental film festival in the desert, an employment workshop for people with disabilities in Tel Aviv, a project to recommend policy on budgets for medical experts in the periphery, a community garden for Ethiopian immigrants and at least five new blogs – these are just a few of the practical outcomes implemented this spring as a result of SHATIL trainings.   

The employment workshop was organized by two graduates of a SHATIL course that trains people with physical and mental disabilities to work for social change. The graduates recruited governmental and NGO partners in the sponsorship of the workshop, during which the two spoke on a panel, "To Open the Locked Door," about their own successes and challenges on the road to gainful employment.   

Earlier this month, more than 1,000 people attended the first ever three-day Desert Environmental Film Festival, initiated by Hila Ackerman, a graduate of the first year of our Negev Environmental Fellows program, out of her desire to raise awareness and concern about environmental and social issues in the Negev. The Festival featured documentary and feature films, lectures, performances, happenings, hikes and more. Ackerman, who heads the environmental unit of the Ramat Hanegev Regional Council, plans for this to be an annual event.

 The fruits of the course, Using the Internet for Influence and Social Change, included five new blogs, among them one on film and human rights, another on empowerment for people coping with mental disabilities, and the blog of a secular community in Gan Yavneh that is trying to increase Jewish-Israeli content in their lives. Blogs are recognized as a medium that can be used to communicate, organize, network and influence.  

Any season of the year is filled with SHATIL courses, workshops and fellowships in various aspects of social change, but this spring – despite the continuing financial crisis – seemed to bear a richer than usual crop. Many of our trainings were, indeed, related to the financial crisis. Social change organizations are more than feeling the pinch – some are teetering – and SHATIL stepped up to the plate with courses on Income Generation, Fundraising from the Community, Managing the Budget in Times of Financial Crisis, a six-month professional fundraisers course in the south in collaboration with Sderot's Sapir College, and more.  

Said one graduate of the southern fundraising course whose participants were immigrants and veterans, religious and secular, Bedouins and kibbutzniks: "The encounter with the course participants gave me back my faith in Israeli society and my feeling that it is possible to change the world." Another said that through the course, she was able to directly experience Arab-Jewish encounter adding, "it was an amazing personal experience."

 In her speech at the graduation ceremony of the course, Esther Suissa, who did her course internship at Yedid in Dimona, said: "Sometimes during our meetings, I would think there had to be some catch here. Why would an organization like SHATIL share its professionalism and vast experience so that more people would engage in fundraising at a time when there are less and less funds to go around? After all, Coca Cola doesn't reveal its secret formula, Intel wouldn't reveal the secrets of chip development and Orange does not collaborate with Cellcom (mobile phone companies.) And I found myself answering the question: It's because of the important end goal: to create real change that will better Israeli society in all its variety." 

Other first time courses this spring: Environmental Leadership in Tuba-Zangaria, in which 17 women teachers in this Upper Galilee Bedouin town learned ways to increase their pupils' awareness of environmental issues, prepared a booklet of environmental activities for children and are working on starting a local environmental committee; Evaluation Capacity Building for Social Change Organizations; Getting to Know the Leader in You (for young people in Rahat);  Leadership in a Stormy Economy; Using Creativity in Social Change Work; and a regional study day on local sustainable economic development – the first step in a long term process of bringing this type of development to Israel's south.