MiniActive

As in the past, this year MiniActive is again offering a range of courses to help participants as mothers, and to grow as people.

Teaching critical first aid to educators

Last week, on October 17, 20 teachers and teachers’ aides began a 44-hour advanced first aid course, designed only for educators. This course will be approved and its graduates will be qualified by the Ministry of Education, and it will run until December.

Learning the basics of CPR

This is the second such course that MiniActive has offered over the past few months.

Learning First Aid to help their families

In August they held a short, 22-hour introductory course, for 35 Palestinian women from all over East Jerusalem.

Different aspects of urgent first aid care

The course consisted of 5, 4 – 4 1/2 – hour meetings. This was one of the first activities held at MiniActive’s new offices in Sheikh Jarrach.

Learning CPR

All came out of the first meeting enthusiastic for the rest.

Measuring blood pressure, pulse

Here’s a Facebook post from the MiniActive Facebook page at the beginning of the 44-hour course:

And at the beginning of the shorter course in August:

And here’s a Facebook post from the end of the August course:

Many thanks to the Jerusalem Foundation for its ongoing support of the MiniActive program!

After 5 full years of fantastic activity, engaging over 1,000 Palestinian women and teenage girls in East Jerusalem, and affecting tens of thousands of Palestinian residents throughout East Jerusalem, MiniActive finally has offices of its own. At the beginning of August, MiniActive began renting its own suite of offices in Sheikh Jarrach.

Welcome to MiniActive’s new offices

MiniActive will continue to operate under the auspices of the JICC. But from now on, the new offices will be the epicenter of MiniActive activity in East Jerusalem.

One of the activities rooms, painted and decorated by MiniActive Youth

The new space features an office and two larger classrooms –

“Intisar, Program Director,” one of the many housewarming presents

One that holds about 30 people (above), and one that holds about 40 people (below).

Learning first aid

Upstairs is the studio (that includes showers and changing rooms) where Zumba and other exercise classes take place that MiniActive uses separately.

Zumba to improve health

The new location is a big plus on all counts. It’s much more centrally located and easier to get to than other locations that activities have been held in. Its rooms are always available, as opposed to needing to work around other centers’ activity schedules. Its setup facilitates more order – more orderly registration, more orderly organizing of classes, more orderly documentation of requests, complaints and campaigns. More order, more professionalism, and we hope, even more success!

More housewarming presents, in green

We wish MiniActive and all its participants a wonderful and fruitful year!

And of course, many thanks to the Jerusalem Foundation for its ongoing support of MiniActive.

We’ve mentioned here and here how we like to show our MiniActive volunteers how much we appreciate their hard work and tenacity. On August 27, we did it again.

Enjoying a beautiful August day

This time, the bus traveled north to Haifa, visiting the Baha’i Gardens,

The Baha’i Gardens, from the top of the hill

and to Acre.

Acre meets the sea

They also enjoyed a boat ride

Enjoying the water

Here’s the Facebook post, in Arabic:

Many thanks to the Jerusalem Foundation for its continued support of MiniActive!

Even before school starts up again, MiniActive Youth is off to a running start. There are several groups – some are just beginning and receiving introductions to the program. They are also learning about the environment and about recycling.

Receiving an initial introduction

There were about 20 – 25 girls in this group. This year, we expect to have such a group meeting every day. (That means some 100 teenage girls!)

Here’s the Facebook post (in Arabic) of the first meeting:

In the second meeting, they continued talking about what kinds of projects they’ll be doing, about leadership, and about other aspects of the program.

Beginning to get down to business

Here’s the MiniActive Facebook post (also in Arabic) of the second meeting.

A third group worked outside a school in Jebel Mukaber.

Working in Jebel Mukaber

Next to the school there is a station for school buses, that looked awful.

The bus stop, before

Next to it was a (another) makeshift garbage dump.

Do we want this next to our schools?

The girls worked every day for a week in mid-August,

Making the bus stop a nicer place to be

to make the school bus stop look like this.

Much better

What an amazing difference!

The fence was painted too!

At the same time, MiniActive women have been working since April to try and take care of that garbage next to the school. Finally, their efforts paid off, and this too was cleared away.

Finally! Much better.

Here’s the Facebook post documenting the painting project:

Many thanks to the Jerusalem Foundation for their continued support of the MiniActive project.

MiniActive never stops. Not even for the month-long Ramadan holiday. During this time, which commemorates the first revelation of the Quran to the Prophet Muhammad, many Muslims fast during the day and eat before dawn and after sunset. It is considered a festive month, so although Muslims do not eat during the day, much time, effort and food are invested in preparing the nightly evening meals, (or Iftar).

Food ready to be divided up as part of a MiniActive food distribution project

Given the severe socio-economic standing of most Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem – some 80% live beneath the poverty line – the month of Ramadan can often be a difficult financial burden. In response to this difficulty, the MiniActive network ran a Ramadan food drive for 100 needy families during the first week of June. MiniActive women not only led the drive, they were the ones who donated and collected the foodstuffs. Afterward, the MiniActive staff prepared and distributed the packages.

Baked goods waiting to be distributed

Foodstuffs were distributed through baskets and re-usable shopping bags. Packages included staples such as flour, salt, sugar, rice and oil and pasta, canned goods as well as other goodies, that will make their Iftar meals festive occasions.

Food packages ready to go

Ramadan Kareem!

Here’s 0202’s English translation of the original Facebook post:

And here’s the original Facebook post in Arabic:

Many thanks to the Jerusalem Foundation for their continued support of the MiniActive project!

In today’s Jerusalem reality, to get things done – at the Municipality, at the water, telephone or electric companies – you need to know Hebrew.

Learning Hebrew as a tool for communication

Last year, as part of MiniActive’s efforts to provide professional development to its participants, and in order to improve the women’s effectiveness, they began participating in weekly Hebrew courses, offered by Speaking Hebrew, which takes place at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Last year 150 women and teenagers took part. This year, over 200 studied Hebrew from MiniActive!

In class

Last week, they held a year-end party for 300 participants and their families, volunteer teachers, and everyone involved in the program.

Graduation ceremony at Hebrew University

There were congratulatory speeches.

MiniActive Director, Intisar, speaking at graduation

Graduation certificates were distributed.

Very proud of their accomplishments

And the women shared the fantastic food that they’d prepared for the party.

Fitting finale to a fantastic year

The women told of how fun it was to learn in the classes – not the standard frontal lessons, but also games and other interactive methods.

The first of many steps to Hebrew fluency

See you next year!

Here’s the Facebook post (in Arabic):

Many thanks to the Jerusalem Foundation for its ongoing support for this project.

MiniActive, the Jerusalem Intercultural Center and the Jerusalem as a Culturally Competent City conference are featured in the May 2017 newsletter of the Cities of Migration Network.

As part of the preparation for the conference, Dr. Adit Dayan, our colleague at the Jerusalem Foundation, attended the Cities of Migration Conference in Toronto. Cities of Migration is an international initiative launched in 2008 to identify and disseminate local integration practice in major immigrant receiving cities worldwide.  The project was the first to link global cities around issues of immigrant integration and has been surprisingly successful. Today, Cities of Migration has an international following of over 7000 international experts, practitioners and policy-makers, and its mailing list reaches 16,000 people worldwide.

Ms. Uzma Shakir, Keynote Speaker at the Jerusalem as a Culturally Competent City conference

After the conference we remained in contact with the Cities of Migration Network.  And this week, they published MiniActive in their May newsletter and as part of their “Good Ideas for Integration”  section on their web site.

Click here for a link to the online article.

And here’s the full text:

MiniActive: Local Women, Local Action

Jerusalem Intercultural Center

Empowering local women and minority populations to become agents of community change

Can a functioning street lamp be the key to peace?   Sometimes, it’s almost that simple.

In 2011 a group of Palestinian women in East Jerusalem decided they’d had enough of broken street lamps, unrepaired roads and other nuisances that caused daily tensions and disrupted the peace of the neighbourhood.   Local volunteers started using the municipal hotline to demand the repair and replacement of faulty street lamps and were soon meeting with relevant municipal authorities. No, the women explained, contrary to what municipal workers too often said, the street lamps would not be broken by local youth.

Five years later, the street lamps are still working, bus stops have been repaired and thousands of other small and large improvements have been made.

Empowered by a unique program called MiniActive that focuses on community-led action and helping local residents become change agents in their own neighborhoods, MiniActive volunteers are leading the way for civic action in East Jerusalem, and across the city.

From Activism to Action

Conditions for the more than 300,000 Palestinians living in poverty in East Jerusalem often put the health and welfare of local residents at risk. The quarter’s winding streets are poorly maintained, filled with potholes and often littered due to inefficient garbage removal by local authorities. Public stairs and walkways are uneven and unsafe, and few public buildings – schools, welfare offices, community organizations – are handicapped accessible.

Compounding these challenges, residents often lack the tools to self-organize and build the organizational capacity needed to effect changes on their own, leaving them feeling dis-empowered and disengaged from civic processes. Such frustrations can be exacerbated by cultural and language barriers, or unfamiliarity with municipal services.

For these reasons, the success of the intervention by Palestinian women in East Jerusalem around municipal repairs to their neighborhood caught the eye of the Jerusalem Intercultural Center (JICC).

Since 2004, the JICC had been engaged in a series of internal discussions about activism as a tool for community change. Since their mission was to help residents of all identities create positive impact within their communities and in the city as a whole, activism seemed an important approach. However, over the years they had noticed that much of the activist energy was non-effective, more cause and complaint than positive impact.

By contrast, the activism of East Jerusalem’s neighbourhood women was practical, positive and place-based.  Its example galvanized the JICC to pilot a new model for community engagement called “MiniActive.”  The central idea? To let people train themselves to change the world, by choosing a very small part of the world to change.

Agents of community change

MiniActive was launched in 2012, with the support and partnership of the JICC and the Jerusalem Foundation and the dual objective of effecting real change and empowering community action. Its goals are to advance human rights in East Jerusalem by creating sustainable grassroots advocacy and empowerment mechanisms; to empower women as agents of change; and to help all residents, but mainly women, take practical steps to improve the everyday lives of East Jerusalem residents.

MiniActive workshops consist of small group meetings in which each of the participants is invited to choose an issue to work on that is both ‘do-able’ and requires working with or convincing others to do something, whether it be neighbours, local agencies or the municipality, because learning to work with others is critical to developing organizational capacity. Examples can be repairing a street light, improving garbage collection in a specific location, fixing a pothole, replacing a safety fence, initiating an event in school, or simply connecting neighbours to meet together over an issue.   The criteria for choosing projects are:

• Results can be achieved in 1-2 months. The relatively quick results seen on the ground in this model boosts participants’ self-confidence and empowers them to ‘graduate’ on to larger and more complex issues.
• The solution cannot be achieved alone – some other body or organization must be activated to achieve success. This often includes the Municipality or other service provider
• A passion for community. The participant has passion to achieve this target issue.

Whether it’s a problem on the street, an issue to be tackled at the local school, or a service improvement at the health clinic, the program empowers participants to identify problems in their immediate community, and helps them to develop effective methods of solving those problems, which can be applied to larger-scale problems in the future as well.

Language classes, recycling, horticulture: a community hub

In 2014 MiniActive upgraded its monthly professional development seminars for their volunteer coordinators from East Jerusalem’s various neighbourhoods. Previously, monthly meetings largely consisted of peer learning and assistance on a case-by-case basis. The new format included workshops on how to map local needs and set priorities; how to navigate the Municipality and its different departments; how to navigate other service providers (phone, electric, water, etc.); how to write letters to these agencies; how to deal with the Municipality’s contractors in the field; who might (or might not) be willing to work with them should a woman be supervising– and more.

In addition to in-service seminars about accessing local services more effectively, Hebrew classes have been organized for more than 200 women to facilitate communication with municipal service providers.  An important project outcome was the addition of Arabic-speakers to the municipal hotline, both to encourage participation and to handle the volume of calls MiniActive outreach was generating.

Since its overall goal is to improve residents’ immediate environment, in 2014 MiniActive began to offer courses and workshops that focused on a broader definition of improving one’s environment, such as composting, recycling, etc.  A photography workshop increased the women’s ability and propensity to look around them and see new ways to improve their neighbourhood.  In 2016, the first ever Arabic-language horticultural therapy course was added.

MiniActive has become a community hub, offering a wide range of activities – from exercise to crocheting to baking to trips – where local women can gather to enjoy their leisure,  each other’s company, and the rewards of hard work.

Today MiniActive’s network of volunteers spills across 15 districts, with 50 – 100 women in each district, and covers nearly every neighbourhood in East Jerusalem. Working in small groups of 4 to 6, the women of MiniActive are working on 500 issues each month, solving approximately half and continuing to work on the remainder, and improving the everyday lives of residents through continual communication and interaction with service providers (telephone, electricity, water, municipality, etc.) and community members.

What’s more, municipal service providers recognize the effectiveness of MiniActive’s work and are less inclined to see the complaints as antagonizing ‘nuisances.’ Rather, MiniActive participants are viewed as partners in the change process.

Success

MiniActive has galvanized civic action in East Jerusalem neighbourhoods. In 2016 alone more than 6,000 formal complaints were filed, and over 2,300 problems resolved. Among the improvements, all bus stops in three neighbourhoods were repaired or replaced.  On a larger scale, MiniActive’s response to an acute problem around garbage removal resulted in the launch of the “We Won’t Live in Filth” Facebook campaign. The result? Millions of shekels were added to the East Jerusalem sanitation budget, and garbage collection became a central issue in local activism throughout Jerusalem.

From its modest beginnings, MiniActive quickly grew to a network of 1,000 Palestinian women in every corner of East Jerusalem, arguably the largest network of volunteers in East Jerusalem.  In 2015, MiniActive’s success was internationally recognized when the project’s director was invited to present at the Global Partnership for Social Accountability (GPSA) Partners Forum in Washington, DC.  In November 2016 a group from the Czech Republic visited Jerusalem to learn about MiniActive. Interest in the project remains lively. Today, the MiniActive Facebook page has over 20,300 ‘likes.’

Over the past 5 years a growing MiniActive volunteer network has solved thousands of neighbourhood problems and is training hundreds of women on how to engage local service providers and municipal services to bring about community change by working with the system, and despite the system.

For the first time, MiniActive empowers participants to be stakeholders in their own future.

The newsletter also featured the remarks made by Uzma Shakir at the conference as a featured story:

Here’s the full text of that article:

Keynote speech by Uzma Shakir, Director of the Office of Equity, Diversity and Human Rights, City of Toronto, on the occasion of the Jerusalem Foundation’s 50th anniversary event, the “Jerusalem as a Culturally Competent City” Conference, hosted by the Jerusalem Intercultural Center on May 17, 2016 in Jerusalem.

In a brilliant, wide-ranging presentation Shakir describes processes taking place in Toronto and throughout Canada regarding multiculturalism and cultural competency, and responses to the country’s vastly different population groups, from the native populations to the Francophone community of Quebec to recent immigrants from south Asia and elsewhere. She first defined the role of cultural competency:

“Cultural competency can be viewed in two ways: it can either be seen as paternalistic and prescriptive – something you do for others who have either limited or unequal power to claim their rights; or transformative and critical – consciously producing spaces that address those power differentials in a meaningful manner and eventually lead to an equitable and just society.

In other words, cultural competency can mean being nice to people while maintaining the status quo of inequality or it can mean empowering marginalized people to take control over their own destiny and to change the conditions in society to produce equitable and just outcomes for all.

However, this requires an honest recognition of who is marginalized and then consciously co-creating the conditions for inclusion. In this sense, Toronto has its challenges just like Jerusalem and provides some compelling lessons.”

Uzma’s description of the role of cultural competency was really a defining moment for us. We realized that our work, experience and know-how was already working on both sides of the cultural competency equation, but we had never defined it as such. We were both training service providers to make services accessible to a wide variety of populations, and we were also empowering marginalized populations – of all kinds and ethnicities – to demand access to services, adapted to their particular needs. This is best represented by Uzma’s illustration:

Three views of Equity

In the first approach, existing infrastructures render services equally for different people. However, since people’s needs are different, equal provision of services does not create proper equality. In the second approach, adjustments are made, often ad hoc, to be able to work within the existing infrastructure to provide services in a way that responds differently to the different needs. In the third approach, infrastructure is built from the start with the different needs of different people in mind, to enable each to meet his or her particular needs in the best way possible.

Ours is the third approach, and in that way MiniActive is helping Jerusalem become more culturally competent. We’re so proud of their accomplishments and dedication, especially in the complex situation in Jerusalem. We’re so happy that tens of thousands of people around the world will be able to learn about MiniActive as well.

Many thanks to the Jerusalem Foundation for their full partnership in developing all aspects of Cultural Competency, as well as in developing the MiniActive project.

MiniActive youth continue to do fantastic work throughout Jerusalem, painting murals and improving the environment.

Beginning to paint

This time, their project was in Sur Baher.

Improving an entire street in Sur Baher

At the request of residents, the youth decorated the walls on either side of this residential street. The residents themselves prepared the ‘canvas,’  first painting it white. All the girls needed to do was come and paint the pictures. Looking great!

Painting flowers and butterflies

Read more about previous MiniActive Youth projects here and here.

And our favorite cartoon characters

And here’s the post from the MiniActive Facebook page (Arabic):

Here’s another post, mid-project:

And here’s the final project – this time all six paintings!

Many thanks to the Jerusalem Foundation for its continuous support of the MiniActive project.