The project proposes to educate groups of youngsters able to work as volunteers and not, in collaboration with the NGOs and with the territorial corporate body, within the social-educational fields, to solicit a progressive improvement of civil society through actions in fields such as local human development, intercultural education and the pacific, non-violent resolution of the conflicts.

The project Education at the Comuna is a  pilot experience to realize into a conflict and rich of ethnic and social problems context as the  Galilee one is, to be later proposed  also in a Palestinian context that will be defined better through the NGOs contacts and networking. About it it is hypothesized, a project development that foresees a first phase of the educational path for young socio-educational operators at distance, of which one part in the Israeli area and the other one in the Palestinian area and a following phase to be planned in deep, after having evaluated the project and its social relapses, an educational proposal for Israelis, Palestinians and Europeans. The first phase could ask for the division in two times: the start of the pilots experience in Upper Galilee and the following year in Palestine.

Respect to that, we believe that both the university network and the European NGOs take a key role to support and facilitate the integration between the two educational experiences.

The pilots project intends to turn to young, Hebrews and Arabs, and to other ethic or religious groups  living  in Upper Galilee. The young people will be lead to live in a situation of Comuna by staying  together at the same house for one year, by participating  the educational path all together  and by daily experimenting, in an active and creative way, the necessary formalities for the pacific cohabitation in the mutual and democratic respect and of every person.

This project proposal carries out from the awareness that the middle-east area has got an urgent need to achieve a society where the young people succeed in being protagonists of their life and succeed in going out from the uneasiness and suffering condition which the war violent conflict produces in both the parts.

There is need to rediscover and to strengthen each person’s deep motivations which allows people to survive also under conditions of strong stress and danger, to find the energies, the vitality and the enthusiasm, but also the critical and constructive reflection on the present problem of the reality, and so to realize projects within the local contexts of life,  taking a social and an educational commitment .

The young people will be educated to get in touch with various educational experiences like: arrangement of intercultural events, support and enrichment strategies for children of disadvantaged families, integrated supports in the schools, assistance to weaker pupils, activities in the youth movements, activities of not formal education with adults oriented to the local human development and the individualization of the gender knowledge potentialities.

The Beresheet LaShalom Comuna is a development project of the local human resources that will be able to give a regenerative push to the inhabitants of the area where the project acts. Thanks to the action developed by motivated young people, in hold collaboration with the local community, new ways of cooperation and cohabitation could be found, so that to find new pacific resolution to the conflicts, through not conventional educational actions as the art, the play, the mutual aid and the exploration of different cultures.

The Participants

The participants will be young with a strong predisposition to the" other", open to the innovations, to the activity, to the educational risk. Ready to take responsibilities and to welcome the other. A professional team of educators and trainers will accompany them during the whole year to help them to explore their own potentialities to be able to help others in future.

The Public

The young will work with young people and children to be able to involve their families and the inhabitants of  the  places in which they live.

Carrying out of the Project

The group will be trained during the summer by a professional team;
The young will choose some projects which they will be responsible for and the promoters of.

The proposal was produced by the Foundation Beresheet LaShalom - Israel 
Prof. Yehuda Livné- President of the Foundation Beresheet LaShalom 
Dr. E. Angelica Calò Livné- Director, Artistic Didactics of Beresheet LaShalom, in accordance with the UNESCO Chair of the University of Florence - Italy. 

edna@beresheetlashalom.org