Haifa NGO reps visit sister city
The Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Boston and four other local non-governmental organizations welcomed a delegation of five Haifa-based NGOs over potato chips and cold sandwiches on Monday. The brown-bag lunch, held in downtown Boston, was the first in a week of events lined up for the Boston-Haifa NGO Learning Exchange.
The Learning Exchange is a first-of-its-kind program involving the two partnership communities, Boston and Haifa, with the longest ongoing relationship between a U.S. and an Israeli city. The NGOs, which have been placed in carefully selected partnerships, will work together to build relationships and help one another develop better tactics as organizations.
"We want to look at Haifa as an example of civil society. What we're doing is an experiment," said Nancy K. Kaufman, executive director of the JCRC. "We don't know where it's going, but I'm a big believer in the process. Trust the process."
Beyond the working partnerships, there is a research component to the project. Donna Haig Friedman, who led the selection process, will be working out of the University of Haifa for the next four months through a Fulbright position, checking up with the organizations and writing academic prognoses of the exchange.
"Some of the things that come out of this will be co-authored products," she said of the partnerships. "There are many audiences for these products, whatever form they may take. I think there will be concrete outcomes from this project."
As a pioneer, the Learning Exchange is already viewed as an example by other communities and NGOs.
"We see this as a model on a global level," said Jane Matlaw, chairperson of the JCRC Boston-Haifa Social Justice Committee. "If we want to live in a civil society, it doesn't matter where you live in the world, you are interested in closing the social and economic gaps."
After this week's consignment of events, the Haifa groups will return home, weary and conceivably jet-lagged, but with deepened relationships and a week to look forward to in March, when the American NGOs will come to Haifa as their guests.
