Grant Recipients
NCJW’s Signature Grant for 2013
WePower-YEDID. WePower, established in 2000, is a non-partisan Israeli NGO promoting women’s leadership and gender integration and equality at all levels of Israeli society. YEDID is the largest national organization in Israel that empowers Israelis to break the cycle of poverty through legal and social assistance, community education initiatives, grassroots organizing, and national advocacy. This grant will help fund a collaborative project of WePower and YEDID, Promote Women’s Vote, which is specifically geared toward the municipal elections in November 2013, to encourage women’s civic engagement and participation in the democratic process, by educating communities and getting out the women’s vote.
NCJW’s Continuing Grants for 2013
ADVA Center is a social policy research institute that works to promote equality for all of Israel’s citizens. This grant will help fund the project, Intervening on the Local Level to Develop Women’s Leadership and to Mainstream Gender, to increase women’s political and economic power and participation. This project creates a model for action on the local level designed to promote more gender-responsive service provision and funding.
The Israel Gay Youth Organization (IGY), the largest gay youth non-profit organization in Israel, supports, encourages, and guides Israel’s LGBTQ youth, while simultaneously creating a strong, resilient network of young, self-assured LGBTQ leaders. This grant will help fund Gay-Straight Alliance groups in public schools to create a safe space to empower students to talk and learn about LGBTQ gender- and sexuality-related issues, their own lives and emotions, and other topics.
Israel Hofshit (Be Free Israel) is a national grassroots movement, founded in 2009, to promote democracy, freedom of religion, and Jewish pluralism in Israel. This grant will help fund the Mobilizing the Israeli Public to Combat Gender Segregation project, which involves organizing a network of community activists composed of thousands of Israelis—of all backgrounds—to take action to advance pluralism, counter religious extremism, and gender segregation by working to ensure that elected officials make these issues a high priority during their administrations.
The Jewish Women’s Collaborative International Fund (JWCIF) is comprised of seventeen Jewish Women’s Foundations/Funds of North America and Israel who have joined forces to help fund the Bringing Women to the Fore project, now called Shutafot (Partners). Their efforts will promote legislation benefiting women, prevent the implementation of policies harmful to women, and create the basis for a broad solidarity among women’s organizations and between these organizations and the women serving throughout the country, and the media.
The NCJW Women Studies Forum at Tel Aviv University (The Forum) is a volunteer association of faculty members and students working to advance research and analysis in feminist studies, and acting as a bridge between academia and the community at large. In cooperation with Itach-Maaki: Women Lawyers for Social Justice, The Teenage Girls Leading for Rights Program, the first program of its kind, aims to develop positive, feminist, and activist leadership amongst teenage girls who will bring about social change on issues that are relevant to their lives.
Turning the Tables is a social initiative to enable women who have broken out of the cycle of prostitution to live productive and independent lives. The Turning the Tables Initiative centers around a fashion design studio, where women receive social services and vocational training, enabling them to eventually earn a livelihood. Turning the Tables is the first and only program to address this issue in Israel.