Selected Projects

 

Women’s Community Kitchen

 

Establishing small businesses is an effective strategy for fighting poverty, unemployment, and low salaries.  Our current project, the Women’s Community Kitchen, grew out of our successful pilot micro-business project, 'Women Cook up a Business' – Unemployed Women Becoming Professional Chefs, which is co-run by Achoti and Kol Ha-Isha.  The Women’s Community Kitchen is a project that seeks to create an innovative model of cooperation for women in building business partnerships by establishing a community kitchen as a joint enterprise with women graduates of micro-business programs, who specialize in the culinary field.  Graduates of 'Women Cook up a Business' and other micro-business programs will establish a supportive and community environment, where these women can gain the skills, work experience and confidence they need to be involved in a Feminist Economic Initiative. Furthermore, the Women’s Community Kitchen provides a kitchen facility with the necessary Ministry of Health and Kashrut certificates.  The Women's Community Kitchen will immediately provide 250 hot meals for the population of the Elwyn Institute for the Mentally Challenged.  In addition, the Women’s Community Kitchen will locate other Institutions and schools within Jerusalem to provide for the School Lunch Program.

 

The Women’s Community Kitchen is based on principles that promise its sustainability.  Firstly, the project creates an interactive environment that provides a business framework, support and resources.  Secondly, the project takes advantage of the business opportunity to provide meals for the Elwyn Institute and School Lunch Program by having a competitive advantage of catering healthy home-cooked food and as well as already being a project that helps women in need will in turn help others.  Lastly, the project benefits from strategic partners in the Kiryat Ha-Yovel Community Administration and the Jerusalem Foundation, which have committed themselves to securing the required infrastructure for the project, and Shatil, which closely works on the public advocacy component of the project.  The women participating in the Women's Community Kitchen learn to manage the kitchen as a joint business, in cooperation with the Project Coordinator and the Professional Business and Financial Consultants. The aim of the project is that the women will gradually be able to run the kitchen independently.  They learn additional business skills and professional culinary skills to make food on a large, institutional scale and to create appropriate menus.  At the first stage, the eight to ten women participants will receive a salary, which even though part-time, the Project guarantees will be fair salary and include social benefits.  This salary will provide a steady income that the women can depend on, while they continue to develop their own businesses. They will also have the option of using the Community Kitchen in the afternoons to work on their own catering.

 

The Women's Community Kitchen has taken major leaps forward, laying a firm basis for its sustainability. First of all we have reached a major breakthrough - to base the Community Kitchen at the Elwyn Rehabilitation Center in Kiryat Ha-Yovel. The use of this brand-new professional, institutional kitchen was secured after an extensive search for a kitchen in the community that meets the project’s needs.  

 

Besides providing the essential infrastructure for the project on an in-kind basis, this arrangement encompasses a great business opportunity, as the Elwyn Center has pledged to order 250 meals a day from the Community Kitchen. The orders by the Elwyn Center – a captive market, to which no transportation is required - will assure a firm initial income for the kitchen. We have already laid the groundwork to expand the number of orders during the first year, through Elwyn’s other centers in Jerusalem, through the School Lunch Program – through the schools’ main supplier, the Amuta le Tafnit baHinuch, mentioned in last year’s proposal and through direct contact with two specific schools –the Adam anthroposophist school and the Bilingual Jewish/Arab School.

 

Furthermore, the Kitchen will fully integrate two women from the Elwyn Center that has a strong orientation to finding employment solutions for its mentally challenged participants within the community, thus providing the Community Kitchen with added social value.

 

The Women's Community Kitchen has begun meeting with a group facilitator, for workshops to gain skills in the areas of work cooperation and being a team player.  In a few days, the Kitchen will receive the Health Department Certificate and in a short time, they will also receive the Kashurt Certificate. 

 

Women's leaderships in a multi-cultural community

The aim of this program is to develop women's leadership qualities. The participants are women from different ethnical origins, orthodox, as well as laic. They will acquire leadership skills for personal aims as well as working within the community.

The program will enable the participants to develop employment projects within the community and to offer solutions for the unemployed women.

Ahoti – Journal of Feminism and Activism

The purpose:

§        To disseminate the credo of the movement Ahoti

§        To give publicity to all feminist ideas

§        To give women who are not accustomed to writing the opportunity and the means to write and express their thoughts.

§        To change, or at least aim to change the feminist-activist agenda in Israel

§        To recruit new members to Ahoti

§        To encourage and empower women who are active in the feminist and activist   domain

 

The total number of contributors to the journal (counting the fourth issue) is now approaching fifty!

Employment project for women

New immigrants from Bacharach, in the poverty surroundings of Tel Aviv: These are women unemployed women, new immigrants from Bacharach, in the poverty surroundings of Tel Aviv. They are professionally qualified but were unable to find jobs suitable for their profession. 

The aim of the project is to provide skills for business initiative.

These skills enable them to find a job suitable for their qualifications or either to open small merchandises of their own.

  

Mizrahi women in the Negev – increasing peace awareness

These days, we are planning in collaboration with the Women's Coalition for just Peace, a project for increasing the peace awareness among Mizrahi women in Negev. Negev is the Southern region of Israel, which had been devastated by the economical government policy. The unemployment rates are the higher in Israel, among the Jewish population as well the Arabs. 

 

 Women Creating a Feminist Economy

The project rests on a unique model of mutual learning and mentoring that involves women from different sectors of the population—women associated with the business elite and later women from the academic world, working with women from the social, economic, and geographic periphery—and is meant, among other things, to shatter traditional strategies of “strong women” who contribute to and teach “weak women.”