english - עדכון לתת אתר

Last week, SHATIL participated in the UN Department of Information's (DPI) human rights conference for NGO's in Paris. Our representative, Dr. Nurit Hashimshoni Yaffe, director of Community Organizing at SHATIL, was one of thousands of NGO representatives from more than 100 countries who gathered to give a renewed push to the UN Declaration of Human rights. SHATIL participated in its capacity as an NGO with Special Consultative Status with the Economic & Social Council, Associated with the Department of Public Information of the United Nations.

Under this banner, SHATIL's Ethiopian Youth at Risk Forum in Haifa protested in front of Haifa's City Council about an untenable situation facing a group of Ethiopian city residents. The presence of the residents in the demonstration, including babies, children and old people, moved passersby and City Council members alike.

In surveying the problems of Ethiopian youth at risk in Haifa, the Forum, Andenet Chail No (Together we are Strong,) came across a building housing 12 Ethiopian families who poured their hearts out to the group.

In the past few weeks, SHATIL marked several successes on the national, regional and local levels:

• The Supreme Court rejected Ramle Mayor Yoel Lavi's appeal of the Attorney General's decision that Lavi could not be appointed as director of the Israel Lands Administration. The Attorney General's decision followed intensive lobbying by SHATIL and its Mixed Cities project after Lavi made violently racist public statements when a SHATIL Mixed Cities staffer approached him about changing street names in Arab neighborhoods in Ramle to reflect Arab culture.

On September 3 and 4, SHATIL held an invitational two-day study seminar on Incorporation into Domestic Israeli Law of the International Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD.)

The seminar aimed to promote the ratification of the convention (which Israel signed in 2006 but has not yet ratified) in Israel and promote civil society supervision and implementation mechanisms regarding this convention. The seminar strongly emphasized individuals with disabilities as advocates on their own behalf.

On August 18, 70 concerned citizens gathered in Be'er Sheva's Youth Center for a conference sponsored by Shatil's Umbrella Forum for Bedouin Education in the Negev. The conference was called following the tragic deaths of four Bedouin children who were killed on the way to school in substandard transport on unpaved, hazardous roads in unrecognized Bedouin villages.

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On August 19, 11 students, all immigrants from the Former Soviet Union (FSU), graduated from the second cycle of a Shatil training course for social entrepreneurs co-sponsored by Ben Gurion University of the Negev. In attendance was Bella Savran, a new Israel-based donor to Shatil's Assistance to Immigrants from the FSU Project. We felt her insights as a social worker and her excitement about the project would inspire our readers.

The course - now preparing for its third cycle -- trains participants in both the theoretical and practical aspects of social change work.

At the age of 11, Miriam Yosef left home and began the treacherous trek to Sudan in order to get to the land of her dreams. In the refugee camps, she watched her close friend, Tezeta, perish from malnutrition. Although she made it to Israel, young Miriam was separated from her parents for nine long and lonely years.

"As children, we had to see things we shouldn't have seen," says Miriam. She went on to feel things no woman should have to feel: she married a man who abused her.

The wheels started turning on August 3rd, as five wheelchair-bound activists left Kiryat Shmona for Jerusalem on a mission to raise public awareness about the plight of the disabled in Israel. Each day, another dozen or so disabled people joined them for the day. The 10-day journey was organized to raise public awareness about the distress of Israel's disabled population - especially those living in the periphery who see themselves as doubly disabled - and to strengthen the disabled protesters who have been camped out in front of the Welfare Ministry for the past two months.

When the largest Russian library outside of the Former Soviet Union, which is also the most used of Jerusalem's 25 public libraries faced the danger of closing, SHATIL's Assistance to Immigrant from the FSU staff went into high gear. Recruiting assistance from SHATIL lobby and media experts, the staff partnered with FSU immigrant organizations to convince the municipality to keep the library open. The building behind the Central Bus Station that had housed the four-story library was sold and a suitable alternative had not been found.

To launch the book, The Sea is Free -- on Environmental Justice and Public Participation in Planning, SHATIL organized an environmental happening in Tel Aviv July 31. The collection of essays is published by SHATIL, the NIF, the Green Environment Fund and the Heschel Center for Environmental Learning and Leadership, in memory of Alona Vardi, founder of SHATIL's' environmental justice project.