Raising our voice through NVC

Empowering Palestinian Community-Based Women Leaders

HISTORY:

Two Years ago when Miki Kashtan and Amal Hadweh shared common vision that empowerment and finding inner freedom come within; 45 Palestinian women came together for the first time at the beautiful town of Bethlehem from all-over Palestine.4 days training to learn, to connect with themselves and to listen deeply to their inner voice of needs and to have fun. We are all devoted to work together to support Palestinian women in mobilizing their wisdom, dignity, and courage to take a lead in transforming their collective situation both personally and within the community settings to work out the woman potentials to create effects that can shift power within the Palestinian community

This training was followed by 2 training with Arnina Kashtan about “Parenting” and “The Freedom Triangle” and training in April 2019 with Miki Kashtan.

Six women had the opportunity to join the NVC training given by Miki Kashtan in Poland in 2018 /2019 with the aim of more learning and steps forward in preparing them to start practicing and training NVC in their communities, work place, home, schools,,, etc.

These “life transformational” trainings gave the women the opportunity to develop greater self-connection and clarity about their needs, to be fully heard, and accepted.

Nurtured and brought more compassionate awareness to the places that limit our capacity for connection and expression of our full humanity.

About the Project: Based on World meters elaboration of the latest United Nations data dated September 27, 2019. The female population in Palestine is 49.25% between ages 25-54 which is our main target group. These women are facing challenges due to the unstable sociopolitical and economical aspect that the whole country is facing; in addition to the pervasive patriarchal perspective which emphasizes and justifies inequality between men and women in the society.

Despite the lack of privacy, restricted social networks, high rates of physical and psychosocial stressors, and limited recreational opportunities prevents the Palestinian women to confront and overcome these challenges and obstacles.In recent years, there have been some gains in women’s status in the public sphere. Women now represent 17% of elected members at the local level and 12.9% of elected representatives at the national level. Well educated women are slowly gaining entry into higher level jobs while most women remain in low status, less valued jobs and many obstacles remain to women achieving high level positions.

All these factors and much more leaded us to search for additional strategies in order to support a shift towards a more central role for women in Palestinian society.

Content

This project has the following components, to be supplemented as the need arises when participants apply their learning:

• Inner freedom: being able to choose a response based on needs

As women leaders face overwhelm, discrimination, and other challenges, their capacity for leadership and innovative responses is compromised. This component is designed to support participants in identifying their core purpose, values, goals, and human needs, and finding paths forward that are inner-directed.

• Building blocks of dialogue, including across differences

Community-based women leaders regularly face the need to engage with people across a wide range of opinions, social positions, and approaches. This component is designed to support participants in enhancing their capacity to express themselves with honesty and care, to ask questions that move conversations forward towards collaboration, and to listen to others effectively. In this way, they can learn to identify what’s important to everyone and move towards a collaborative path forward.

• Working for transformation without recreating the past

Like everywhere else in the world, women leaders working to transform their society face external and internal systems and habits that often result in losing track of vision and values and beginning to operate in the very same way that the existing system does. This component of the program is designed to equip women in the deep principles and practices of nonviolent social change so that their efforts to transform communities and their society will have an alignment between vision, purpose, and values on the one hand and the actual means used to carry out the work.

• Collaborative decision making in groups (including Convergent Facilitation)

Leadership often means supporting groups with multiple agendas and interests in coming together towards solutions that work for all. This component is designed to provide principles and practices that support groups, and those who facilitate their meetings, in identifying all that is important to all stakeholders in the group, exploring options for attending to all criteria thus derived, and landing on the decision and path forward that best attends to everyone’s needs.

• Understanding nonviolence as combining courage, truth, and love

This component of the program is the underlying basis for all the specific pieces that participants examine in this project. It is designed to support exploration and integration of the principles of nonviolence in thought, word, and deed.

We Palestinian women are very much appreciating you supports that make our dream come true and our needs fulfilled. Your generous support is very precious to us and will contribute to our wellbeing and well becoming. We will be celebrating the way our lives have been enriched by your support.

We are asking you to spread our work in your network and to share our dream to reach a wide community

Budget

This budget is based on the assumption that many of the women will not be able to contribute financially given their community-based social location. While other women may be able to come and cover their participation, this basic budget for the participation of 20 women remains necessary to cover through fundraising. As well as for 6 women to be able to join again Poland training in May 2020

Description	Amt	#	Total	Comments
Travel for some participants			$300
Room and board	$173	23	$8,326	3 nights and 4 days for 20 participants and the training team
Translation + telecommunication	400	1	400
Stationary	200	1	200
Organizer fee	$1000	1	$1000
Assistant trainer fee	$2,000	1	$2,000	$50 per hour for 4 days
Trainer fee			0
Poland Fee	$1,082.50	6	$6,495.0
Total amount to be raised			$18,721 65500 ILS

Bios

Miki Kashtan, the lead trainer and facilitator for this project, is an internationally recognized senior trainer in Nonviolent Communication and the founder of Bay Area Nonviolent Communication. She is based in Oakland, CA, and has taught and consulted on all five continents, including doing previous work in Palestine. Her primary focus is on supporting visionary leadership towards a livable future for all life. She holds a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California in Berkeley, and is the author of Reweaving Our Human Fabric: Working Together to Create a Nonviolent Future.

Dr. Amal Hadweh has been bestowed an honorary Doctorate degree from the Universitat Politecnica de Catalonya in Spain in Novermber 2016 and has been Appointed to the Board of Trustees of Bethlehem University. She has been elected to the Beit Jala Municipal Council in 2012, and she leads the city’s strategic planning initiative. After 26 years of working in refugee camps, she recently retired from the UN, where she served as program manager from 2002 to 2010. As part of her work there, was served as manager of the Millennium Development Goals on women's empowerment and gender equality and acting field administration officer, where she oversaw the daily management of all UNRWA facilities in Jerusalem and West Bank and supervised 4,000 employees. Prior to that, Dr. Hadweh worked as an English teacher and school principal. She is a founding member of the Palestinian-Israeli Women’s Dialogue. She is the leading Palestinian trainer of Nonviolent Communication. Dr. Hadweh holds a PhD in business administration with a specialization in human resource management from American World University Washington in the district of Colombia, a master’s degree in education from Al-Quds University, and a bachelor’s degree in English from Bethlehem University. She is a part-time lecturer at Bethlehem University and Al-Quds University.