About Mahapach-Taghir
Mahapach-Taghir is a Jewish–Arab, feminist, non-profit organization for social change established in 1999. The vision of Mahapach-Taghir is a just Israeli society with equal socio-economic and educational opportunities for all, and a strong democratic civil society. Mahapach-Taghir’s main goal is to minimize educational and social gaps in Israeli society. The organization's target groups are the local residents of seven socially and physically marginalized communities - with an emphasis on children, youth and women - and include Kiryat Shmona in the north and Sderot in the south, Kattamonim and Kiryat-Yovel neighborhoods in Jerusalem, Florentine neighborhood in Tel Aviv-Yaffo, and the Arabic towns Tamra and Yaffia. College and university students are an additional essential target group, and are a vital component in creating solidarity within the community and in promoting social change. As of today, some six-hundred children and their families, and some two-hundred students and volunteers participate in activities within the different communities.
Decreasing the prevailing gaps in Israel in access to quality education, and the attainment of knowledge and tools for civil action, are essential in promoting a future based on equality and justice. For this reason, Mahapach-Taghir has developed the unique model of the Learning Community that provides children and youth with supplementary pedagogical tutoring while encouraging their parents and other adults in the community to be actively involved in the education of the future generation. University students take part in the Learning Community as tutors and overseers of social and educational activities, and act as agents of social change within the community and within Israeli civic society as a whole. Binding together pedagogical and communal work is Mahapach-Taghir's distinctive strategy, which encourages personal and communal initiatives that raise social awareness and enable community members and academic students to become agents of social change.
One of the necessary initial steps required in order to achieve a meaningful change in the communities in which we are active is to enable them to become empowered communities, capable of demanding and achieving their rights to equal education opportunities and equal access to public resources and socio-economic rights. This process must include raising the socio-political awareness of the community, allowing it to grasp its situation in a wider socio-political context and, on this basis, to cooperate with other sectors and assume personal and communal responsibility.
Mahapach-Taghir's experience in grassroots training work and in outreach work indicates that women are the ideal candidates for an empowerment process and the establishment of communal leadership. When provided with the required tools and networking, women are the most effective local change agents: their unique position as the main family caregiver brings them in contact with many elements within the community and with official bodies. Moreover, many concerns are shared by the women in all of Mahapach-Taghir’s communities and serve as a foundation that encourages partnership between Jews and Arabs, bringing about an inclusive dialogue between communities that often identify one another as competing over the same resources. By building women's communal leadership, Mahapach-Taghir aims not only to promote a feminist agenda but also to promote an inclusive Jewish-Arab women’s partnership based on a shared civic agenda of human rights.
It is this understanding - that partnership is not only possible but also necessary - that has impacted the structure of the organization itself: Mahapach-Taghir is managed by a Jewish-Arab female co-directorship and its community coordinators are all women – Jewish and Arab.
