MiniActive

MiniActive and our friends from Natan have been partners for the past few years. We enjoy updating them with reports and periodic updates, but it’s really not the same until you see it with your own eyes.

Working with our friends from Natan

So we were very happy to share MiniActive experiences with our friends from Natan this past week.

Building the flower bed

We hosted them at the community garden at the Central Arab Library in Wadi Joz, where our MiniActive Youth often work.

Everyone helping to put it together

They did a great job of building a flower bed and planting beautiful flowers.

Planting a beautiful flower bed as well

Thanks so much to our friends from Natan! You help make MiniActive the success it is today.

We’ve described here and here about how the MiniActive volunteers enjoy learning Hebrew, and how they’ve found it very useful in their everyday lives.

Learning English, close to home

Now, in cooperation with the US Embassy in Jerusalem, MiniActive women are also learning English! There are two courses, with 12 women in each course, one intermediate level, one advanced level. These courses will meet 11 times, and at the end, participants will be able to speak English.

Each learning at her level, toward a better future

This is the first time MiniActive is participating in the courses, and the first time that they’re taking place outside the US Embassy or any of its Jerusalem branches. Good luck to all the participants!

Thank you to our partners for this opportunity!

Here’s a post in Arabic from the MiniActive Facebook page:

And of course, many thanks to the Jerusalem Foundation and to Natan for their support of MiniActive!

On December 3, 2019, our Intisar, Director of MiniActive, led a round table about MiniActive at the annual Gishurim Conference. This conference is organized each year for those involved with community mediation centers throughout Israel. We’ve been among the organizers of this conference since its beginning.

MiniActive as an example of communication between residents and the municipality in Jerusalem

The conference included a number of lectures, as well as round-table sessions with a number of initiatives. Intisar spoke about the history and rationale of MiniActive, and how it has gained the successes it has.

She also emphasized 5 main principles that guide MiniActive:

1. The basis of work needs to start from the bottom-up, from the grassroots toward the local authority.
2. Small success in a short time period (no more than 3 weeks) are important to the process of building confidence and trust.
3. It is important to choose one precise issue to take care of, preferably in the local area, in order to be able to follow-up and to demonstrate success.
4. PR as a way to pressure the local authority into action and to raise public awareness about the problem. Traditional and social media as effective ways to document the problem and provide visual messaging to officials who can help solve the problem.
5. It is important to publish “before” and “after” photos to the public (via social media) to demonstrate success and to build confidence in the initiative.

Here’s a post (in Hebrew) about the conference, which gathered 500 from all around Israel who are involved in community mediation centers.

Many thanks to the Jerusalem Foundation and to Natan for their support of MiniActive!

This is much more than a picture of a wall. It is the picture of a huge success for MiniActive in the A-thory / Abu Tor neighborhood.

This is more than just a wall

For years, there was no wall. It was an open space, which looked like this.

Makeshift garbage dump in A-Thory / Abu-Tor

Since February 2019, MiniActive has been working to clean up a garbage dump in the neighborhood. It was filled with household waste, which is a huge problem in East Jerusalem.

For lack of a better place, residents threw their garbage here

Another problem was that, technically, the land on which the garbage was dumped was private property, not public land, so the Municipality was technically not responsible to clean it up. However, only the Municipality had the tools and equipment to clean it up properly, and it is their responsibility to provide sanitation services to residents. MiniActive held a number of meetings with those responsible to work out a solution. Residents also wrote three letters, demonstrating their own commitment to help keep the area clean in the future. These letters included:

1. A commitment to make sure the area remains clean, and ensuring that residents won’t throw their garbage there.
2. A commitment to put garbage receptacles beside every building.
3. A commitment not to burn garbage or garbage receptacles (which is sometimes done in East Jerusalem as a last-ditch effort to get rid of garbage) and that they’ll report to the Municipality every time garbage is not collected regularly.

After two weeks of cleaning up, better but still not completed

The process of cleaning up the area began in mid-September, and lasted until the end of October. Here’s a Facebook post from the beginning of work in mid-September:

Here’s a later Facebook post, from the middle of work in early October.

In November, the owner added the wall, to prevent further dumping.

Ensuring a clean area

Many thanks to the Jerusalem Foundation and to Natan for their support of MiniActive!

As schools in East Jerusalem went out on Spring Break, our MiniActive Boys started out on a new project, helping their community.

Creating benches from shipping pallets

In cooperation with the Sur Baher Community Center, they started building benches from shipping pallets.

Each boy was given specific tasks

What a neat thing to do during school vacation!

Adding interest to an otherwise empty patio

Here’s the post in Arabic:

Many thanks to the Jerusalem Foundation and Natan Fund for their continued support of MiniActive.