Effective Activism | The Jerusalem Intercultural Center

Garbage as Art in the Public Sphere

As a result of the Little Prince – Cleaning Up Jerusalem Together, in cooperation with local residents and the Jerusalem Municipality, it is now so much more pleasant to throw the garbage in the trash.

Into the mouths of cats

Residents of the Pat neighborhood, who came together to promote neighborhood cleanliness, at first wanted to replace the big (and ugly) garbage receptacles with smaller, more aesthetic bins. Because all the bins are slated to be replaced by underground receptacles in the near future, the Municipality did not approve the residents’ request.

Jerusalem skyline on a garbage receptacle

Serious activists don’t give up, so the residents made another suggestion: Let’s decorate the bins to make it more fun to throw away the garbage! Then we can encourage people to throw garbage into the bin and not leave it on the ground around it. And, together with local artists, bins in the Pat neighborhood look like this:

Your nearby garbage bin, wrapped as a present!

The result: here’s a look at the first bins that have been transformed with adorable graffiti paintings!

Monstors are eating my garbage!

After the success of the first bins, the residents are calling on the rest of Jerusalem to join in and bring color to the public space.

A number of local artists, each wtih different styles

We can definitely call this a garbage revolution!

Here’s a post from the local community center’s Facebook page, where even Mayor Moshe Lion took notice:

Here’s a second post, with pictures of more receptacles:

Many thanks to the Jerusalem Foundation and the Rayne Foundation for their support of the Little Prince.

talkligman2020-01-17T10:37:35+00:00January 19th, 2020|Blog, The Little Prince - Cleaning Jerusalem Together|

The Little Prince 2019 – Taking Stock, Looking Forward

We recently took stock of everything that happened in 2019 as a result of the Little Prince’s activities, and see what been happening! Here’s a partial list.

Moshe Lion as a mayoral candidate, after signing the Clean City platform

In 2019:

The Jerusalem Municipality cleared over 1/2 million tons of garbage!!
More cleaning workers were added – 500 subcontract workers will be added to the street-sweeping system by the end of next year.
More street-sweeping vehicles and cranes – the Jerusalem Municipality bought new vehicles for every area of the city.
The Enforcement Division began giving reports for throwing trash in the street, for leaving garbage bags outside the bins, construction waste, garbage from businesses, those who don’t clean up after their dogs, and more. (Until 2019, the Enforcement Division had not given any reports for garbage issues!)
About 20 neighborhood groups of residents working for cleaning the neighborhood were established.
Some neighborhoods were assigned special days to clear landscaping waste and large furniture. By the end of next year, all neighborhoods will have been assigned a fixed day.
Garbage began being collected on Saturday nights all over the city!
Containers and trash cans have been upgraded in many neighborhoods.
The first part of a Clean City Campaign began (in cooperation with residents).
The first garbage parade was held in cooperation with residents and the Municipality.
During the summer months, there were over 140 educational activities in the gardens and parks.
Educational programs on keeping streets clean began to be implemented in schools and kindergartens in all educational systems (religious, secular, ultra-Orthodox and Arab).
Trash cans were decorated with colorful paintings.
Private open spaces: In the 2020 work plan, some of the private open spaces will be cleaned by the Municipality (depending on their size and type). All residents will receive notifications before areas close to them are cleaned.
Residents and professionals forums were set up with senior operations manager and several active work groups.

There’s going to be so much more in the upcoming year …. You could say that the city is still dirty, that there hasn’t been any change. But you can also say, look how far we’ve come and how much we’ve achieved.
Happy New Year to everyone
* Pictured: Moshe Leon holds the Little Prince’s cleaning platform – October 2018.

Here’s the post that was published in the Little Prince Facebook group:

Many thanks to the Jerusalem Foundation and the Rayne Foundation for their support of the Little Prince.

Naomi Roff2020-01-10T21:15:40+00:00January 15th, 2020|Blog, Effective Activism, The Little Prince - Cleaning Jerusalem Together|

Living Safer, Living Longer and MiniActive Joining Forces to Make East Jerusalem Safer for Families

Living Safer, Living Longer and MiniActive have enjoyed a fruitful partnership since the project began.

MiniActive Living Safer, Living Longer, visiting local fire department

One group has already been trained, and we are now training a second group of women to advance home safety and preventive health measures from within the community. This group began training on November 12, and they’re already practicing doing individual mentoring in homes, together with our staff.

An integral part of the training is fire prevention, since house fires are a huge problem in East Jerusalem. (You might remember the fire prevention training from the first group, with this unforgettable video here.)

As part of this training group members visited the local fire department in Wadi Joz on December 10, 2019. Here’s a Facebook post (in Arabic, of course) from the MiniActive Facebook page:

And many thanks to the Jerusalem Foundation for its support of Living Safer, Living Longer and MiniActive, and to the Natan Fund for their additional support of MiniActive.

Naomi Roff2020-01-10T20:49:46+00:00December 27th, 2019|Blog, Living Safer Living Longer, MiniActive|

The Little Prince – Changing Municipal Priorities

We’ve written in the past about how the Little Prince – Cleaning Up Jerusalem Together is changing priorities across the city, including in the Municipality. You can read examples here, here, and here.

Along this line, we recently came across this article in the Jerusalem Post, which sums up Mayor Moshe Lion’s first year in office. Proof of the success of the Little Prince project, cleanliness has been on of the Municipality’s main focuses this first year. Here is what the article had to say about it:

Lion identified four major challenges plaguing Jerusalem: housing; job opportunities for young, educated people; traffic; and cleanliness, (emphasis ours) and he told The Jerusalem Post that he has acted on all fronts to strengthen the city.

The article went on to describe his efforts:

“The city is much cleaner now than before I started,” [Moshe Lion] told the Post.

Lion has moved to bolster the city’s underground waste collection system, which includes a network of underground waste containers.

The move threatened Jerusalem’s cats, which were accustomed to eating out of the large green trash receptacles that forever littered Jerusalem’s sidewalks and alleyways. To ensure that the cats remained healthy, Lion erected some 150,000 cat-food stands that are filled by a team of community volunteers.

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum, deputy mayor of Jerusalem, commented how instituting Saturday night trash collection across the city has significantly impacted the holy city’s cleanliness standards. Moreover, she added, Lion is immediately responsive to mess, if pointed out to him. She said sometimes she will see an area in need of cleaning. She’ll snap a picture on her phone and send it to him with the coordinates. Almost instantly, he will send a team out to take care of the problem.

Lion has also secured a NIS 200m. – NIS 50m. per year for the next four years – investment to repave roads and upgrade sidewalks with stones, benches and trash receptacles.

The city has also issued a poster, summarizing the city’s accomplishments in improving cleanliness in the city:

Jerusalem’s accomplishments in cleaning up the city

The poster says:

In 2019 more than NIS 200 million has been invested in cleaning up Jerusalem.

We’ve added 600 sanitation workers.
We’ve operated 50 street-cleaning machines and 30 cars to deal with trash.
We’re sweeping streets by hand daily in the neighborhoods and are cleaning the streets daily.
We’ve begun collecting trash on Saturday nights throughout the city.
We’ve begun collecting tree cuttings and other landscaping waste every Tuesday.
We’ve installed 650 underground trash receptacles.
We’ve cleared away 2,500 abandoned cars.
We’ve established new public restrooms.

After a year in office, Mayor Moshe Lion was interviewed on the main national Israeli news program of “Kan”. The main title of the interview, as can be seen in the picture below was: Jerusalem Mayor announces (paraphrased from Hebrew): “let’s do more cleaning, less ‘vision-talk'”.

Jerusalem Mayor announces: “let’s do more cleaning, less ‘vision-talk'”

Let’s hope that the city and the Little Prince continue to make Jerusalem a cleaner city. Many thanks to the Jerusalem Foundation and the Rayne Foundation for their support of the Little Prince.

Naomi Roff2020-01-10T21:15:55+00:00December 19th, 2019|Blog, The Little Prince - Cleaning Jerusalem Together|

MiniActive at the Gishurim Conference

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:

The basis of work needs to start from the bottom-up, from the grassroots toward the local authority.
Small success in a short time period (no more than 3 weeks) are important to the process of building confidence and trust.
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.
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.
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!

Naomi Roff2020-01-10T20:44:39+00:00December 13th, 2019|Blog, MiniActive|

MiniActive – Acting on Cleaning Up East Jerusalem, on Problems Big and Small

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:

A commitment to make sure the area remains clean, and ensuring that residents won’t throw their garbage there.
A commitment to put garbage receptacles beside every building.
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!

Naomi Roff2019-12-27T08:51:22+00:00December 3rd, 2019|Blog, MiniActive|

The Little Prince – Building Long-term Partnerships

In the “Little Prince” program, when we began two years ago with a host of residents’ initiatives, our goal was to make Jerusalem clean. But an equally important goal was to establish a genuine, mutual and active partnership with the Jerusalem Municipality and its various departments. And today, it’s actually happening!

After much work by members of the Little Prince, and slowly weaving ongoing and long-lasting relationships with municipal officials and professionals, we, along with city representatives, built a number of forums in which residents and municipal officials meet to discuss issues, advance common agendas, and solve problems, as well as collaborate in thinking, planning and carrying out additional plans. We’re talking about partnerships with senior-level officials, with residents from many neighborhoods …. a truly exciting moment.

Forums of residents and professionals, building long-term partnerships

During the summer vacation, a broad forum of ultra-Orthodox residents, representatives from all neighborhoods throughout the city, met with the senior level officials from the Operations Administration that included the regional manager, the coordinator of the citywide objective, division managers and their staff, district managers, the manager of the 106 hotline, director of public participation from the municipality, senior managers from the Community Administration, and more.

After the summer vacation, a similar forum was held by residents of the ‘general’ Jewish sector (religious and secular Jews) with senior representatives from every division: Operations Administration, the Culture Society, and Sport Administration, the Community Administration, and the for Service Quality Authority.

Numerous forums, targeting different problems

For those who say that there is nothing to be excited about from two meetings, we can say that in light of these two meetings, there have already been two work meetings in each of the forums, one with the Sanitation Division and one with the Policing and Enforcement Division. All the meetings had a nice atmosphere, were held in a professional manner, and discussions stayed on point. Both ‘sides’ asked questions and received information, raised ideas to advance solutions, thoughts and discussions were shared, needs were raised and initiatives were proposed. Admittedly, this is not a common perception of meetings between residents and municipal officials.

We are currently setting up a Forum for Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem, which must be built with the utmost sensitivity to regarding both residents and municipal officials.

Building a partnership of this kind is a fascinating process that requires both sides to change their perceptions of the other, which have taken root and now it is time to change: Replacing perception of waste, inefficiency, annoyances and complaining to one of trust, giving each other credit, mutuality respect and responsibility, and professionalism.

The residents of Jerusalem and the municipal officials are gaining experience in a long-term partnership process on “difficult” issues of sanitation, supervision and gardening, which has never taken place before in the city.

Thanks to the Director of the Operations Administration, who opened the door, and to Mayor Lion who is fully supportive.

Here’s a post (in Hebrew) that originally appeared in the Little Prince – Cleaning Up Jerusalem Together Facebook group in July about the forum for Haredi residents. Today the processes in the Haredi, ‘general’ Jewish and Palestinian sectors are continuing to develop and gain momentum…

Many thanks to the Jerusalem Foundation and the Rayne Foundation for their support of the Little Prince!!!

Naomi Roff2019-11-22T13:17:06+00:00November 20th, 2019|Blog, Effective Activism, The Little Prince - Cleaning Jerusalem Together|

The Little Prince – Cleaning Up Jerusalem at a Top Priority in Jerusalem

It started as the dream of one – and now many – activists, and now it’s a top Jerusalem priority.

As Mayor Moshe Lion rounds up his first year in office and plans his second, we see that making Jerusalem clean covers 3 of his top 5 priorities. More importantly, it also means that a significant amount of municipal resources – hundreds of millions of shekels, will be invested toward this goal. According to this article, published in Jerusalem’s Kol Ha’ir local newspaper, top priorities include:

Increasing garbage collection on Saturday nights, both to be in-line with heightened usage on Saturdays, and to have 100 fewer garbage trucks on the roads on Sunday mornings, causing traffic congestion.
Addition of 600 more sanitation workers
Addition of 1,000 underground garbage receptacles, which are cleaner, take up less space, and hold more than the traditional above-ground kind.

Kol Ha’Ir article on the mayor’s 2019 – 2020 work plan

Kol Hakavod – congratulations to all the neighborhood activists throughout Jerusalem who helped this come about! Kol Hakavod to Municipal officials, professionals and city council members, who are our full partners in helping make Jerusalem a clean city.

Many thanks to the Rayne Foundation and the Jerusalem Foundation for their support for this program.

Naomi Roff2019-11-22T13:31:31+00:00November 12th, 2019|Blog, Effective Activism, The Little Prince - Cleaning Jerusalem Together|

Sometimes Dreams of a Clean Jerusalem Come True

One of the key issues Little Prince deals with is problematic urban areas, which are used by all residents of the city and are not cleaned, ever.

The reason: Its zoning is such that it’s unclear who’s responsible for the area, the municipality or residents, so nobody cleans. True, the ultimate responsibility for cleaning the entire city is that of the municipality – and it is this perspective that members of the Little Prince are working to advance – but it has still yet to be adopted by all municipal departments.

Little by little, members of the Little Prince choose a different area and tour with municipal professionals and officials and meet with them. They connect between professionals in the different departments: sanitation, horticulture and ticketing and enforcement, regional manager for urban planning and more, to make the municipality take responsibility for cleaning the particular area and not only once, but as part of its regular routine.

Nayot grove, finally clean

One of the many examples of the complexity of this process is a grove in the Nayot neighborhood. Residents have been trying for years to get the municipality to clean up the neglected area, but the municipality did not take responsibility. The area is large, and residents from all parts of the city use it often, so it’s not logical that local residents be held responsible for the entire area.

As a result of the methods developed by the Little Prince and the networking and connections developed by its members with municipal officials from the gardening, sanitation, and local enforcement departments, and the Municipality is now cleaning the area on an ongoing basis, each week.

Not only along the street, but among the trees as well

Here is an example of a message written by one of the residencies after the first cleaning of the municipality in late September 2019:

Sometimes dreams come true … Today they cleaned the grove on Yehoshua Yavin St. Zoned as a ‘brown’ area that the Municipality leased from the Israel Lands Authority that leased it from the Greek Patriarch. For years no department agreed to clean it. Today the sanitation department has made a historic and hysterical move. Wishing us a happy and clean year in the capital city!

Whatsapp message, with author’s permission

And the next day …..

Guess what? They cleaned an additional grove on Yehoshua Yavin St. Now we can wish a happy and clean year for everyone. Well done to the caring residents and the sanitation workers who are showing more and more partnership and dedication. Thank you, and may this only continue and only the best!.

Let’s hope that it’ll be like this all the time!

This was reported in the Little Prince’s Hebrew-language Facebook group:

Many thanks to the Jerusalem Foundation and Rayne Foundation for their support of the Little Prince!

Naomi Roff2019-11-25T07:53:55+00:00November 8th, 2019|Blog, Effective Activism, The Little Prince - Cleaning Jerusalem Together|

MiniActive – Kickoff Event

On October 24 we held an opening event for 150 MiniActive women. The evening was filled with cultural performances, from debka dancing to poetry to playback theater.

MiniActive in balloons

The evening sought to thank the women for their hard work over the years, and served to launch the new activity year.

Held at the YWCA in East Jerusalem, home of the MiniActive offices

There was good dancing.

Women’s dance group

The women enjoyed playback theater, where an improv group performed humorous sketches with audience participation. The program also included poetry readings.

MiniActive women enjoy playbacck theater

We showed a year-end video, with highlights from last year. Here’s the video / presentation:

Here’s the post from the MiniActive Facebook page:

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

Naomi Roff2020-08-19T13:10:15+00:00October 31st, 2019|Blog, Effective Activism, Identity Groups and Conflicts, MiniActive, Palestinians/Arabs|