For the past three years our Multicultural Activism Desk has been helping the Nefashot initiative to produce the Making Souls Festival at the end of November (you can see posts about it here and here).
Making Souls Festival Poster
Making Souls focuses on activism for mental health issues and tolerance toward issues relating to mental health. This year, the Making Souls Festival took place between November 29 – December 5, after we’ve been mentoring the group and the events since June. This year, even during – or maybe because of? – the Covid pandemic, there were 40 (!) events (80 events applied to take part, but only 40 were accepted), when in previous years there were between 20 – 30. This included engaging many more partners in creating the week of events. It seemed like the week filled a basic need for many people, especially during this period, to deal with mental health issues and to understand it is part of all of our lives. The week was an amazing success: More than 30% of the initiatives were in fields of arts and culture, and 2,400 people took part in real time, and the events and the awareness of the festival reached 12,000 people, more than double the audience reached in previous year. We continue to work with our friends and partners from Nefashot on moving forward – maintaining the special connections that were formed and blazing new paths.
The video in the Hebrew Facebook post below shows the week in pictures. Enjoy the diversity, breadth and depth of the events!
And, of course, many thanks to the Jerusalem Foundation, the Natan Fund and the U.S. Embassy Jerusalem, Tel Aviv Branch Office and U.S. Consulate General Jerusalem for helping us to advance tolerance and cross-cultural activism in Jerusalem.
