Economic Citizenship. Amalia Sa’ar
Be’atsmi’s declared goal, as stated on its website, is to help low-opportunity people of diverse backgrounds—women and men, Jews and Arabs, ultra-Orthodox Jews, new immigrants, and former prisoners—find sustainable and fair employment to match their skills and ambitions. In 2012 it reported operating forty-one projects in thirty-three communities across Israel, with a cumulative total of 7,500 participants.11 Over the years, Be’atsmi has won tenders to operate projects that had been developed by Tevet-JDC. One of these, whose operation was divided between Be’atsmi and the Women’s Lobby, was Eshet Hayil (Hebrew, “Woman of Valor”).
In 2010, research assistant Liraz Sapir held telephone interviews with representatives of Be’atsmi and the Women’s Lobby, as part of the Van Leer Research Group Survey, to map the involvement of civil society organizations in the field of social economy. In her interview, the Be’atsmi representative reported Eshet Hayil as the main project of that organization. Designed “for women from Ethiopia, the Caucasus, Bukhara, Arabs and locally born Israelis on welfare … Very weak, with hardly any education … ,” Eshet Hayil reportedly operated slightly over thirty groups in a wide variety of localities across the country. Each of the two representatives (of Be’atsmi and of the Women’s Lobby) gave a similar estimate of 1,500 trainees per year and over thirty employees, most of them working part time. The Be’atsmi representative also said, “Soon there will be a new tender from the Welfare Ministry and we’ll start operating on their behalf,” and noted, “It’s a great success for the program that a government ministry wants to adopt it.”
As it turned out, both organizations eventually lost their franchise to operate the project. In 2013, Tevet’s website reported that Eshet Hayil was operated by the Association for Encouraging and Advancing Community Centers in Israel, together with the MITL, the Ministry of Housing/Neighborhood Renewal, the Ministry of Immigration Absorption, and local municipalities. Yet while this particular program moved entirely to the domain of the state and local municipalities, the two above NPOs continued to be active through other programs. As of 2013, Be’atsmi reported a different large-scale project, Mifne (Hebrew, “Change”). Another product of Tevet, Mifne offers “intensive individual and group escort in order to create an occupational change in people’s lives.”12 As for the Women’s Lobby, this veteran liberal-feminist organization continues its general cause of promoting women’s rights. Since its franchise to operate Eshet Hayil ended, it has continued its ongoing activities of lobbying, producing indexes and data analyses, and doing empowerment work with women and girls. For this feminist organization, like others that we shall meet in Chapter 3, getting into a large-scale project in the specific field of employment made sense considering the momentum that gathered around this topic. Yet because its basic agenda is more general, it could afford to “lose” it and stay active.
As the idea of corporate responsibility began to gain popularity, so did the attempts to standardize and regulate “social giving” (netina hevratit), as Israelis like to call this type of philanthropy. For example, in 1995 a group led by businessman Ronny Douek established Zionism 2000, which aims to promote active citizenship by standardizing social philanthropy and creating collaborations of the business community, the government, and civil society. Designating three target populations—children and youth at risk, residents of Israel’s periphery, and the business/private sector, Zionism 2000 involves “thousands of volunteers, educators, social leaders, philanthropists, and business corporations” in “promoting a new and improved social agenda.”13 In 2006 it established Shitufim (Hebrew, “Sharing”), together with three other philanthropic foundations. Shitufim’s declared goals are to further the establishment of “effective” [using the English word] and meaningful Israeli charity, to promote third-sector organizations, and to foster active dialogue among NGOs, businesses, and government. To achieve these goals it organizes intersectorial round tables and creates knowledge: it produces databases, publishes reports, and popularizes catchy terms such as “social capital” and “diversity.”
Zionism 2000 with Shitufim, like JDC Israel with Tevet, in their capacity to mobilize substantial funding, engage decision makers and high-profile politicians, execute ambitious projects, and exert significant influence on the agenda and discourse of social responsibility, are strategic actors in the field of social economy. Eitan Shani, a social analyst I interviewed in 2013, who has been evaluating the impact of social economy projects since 2008, counted them as “infrastructure organizations,” together with about ten others. Beyond immersion in particular projects, these organizations aspire to plan and organize philanthropy and corporate responsibility better, to develop standardized measurements of social impact, promote transparency and accountability, professionalize NGOs’ financial and organizational management, and develop a language in which ideas of social sustainability can be communicated across the full spectrum of government, businesses, and civil society.
Grassroots Grounded Projects
Despite the heavy involvement of the business and government sectors, grassroots organizations have played an important part in shaping and operating the field of social economy. These are human rights, minority rights, and feminist organizations, which in the late 1990s began to shift their focus toward the domain of economic rights and launched pioneering initiatives in that direction, taking inspiration from CED initiatives in other countries. These groups sprang up from the legacy of human rights, so when they started working on the economic empowerment of women and minorities they were ill-equipped, ideologically and organizationally, to collaborate with the business, state, or municipal sectors. For example, when Economic Empowerment for Women, one of the grassroots organizations in which I did fieldwork for this research, launched its first microentrepreneurship course in 1999, its representatives were laughed out of the offices of MATI, an agency of the MITL that gives consultancy services for small businesses, to which they applied for collaboration. Less than a decade later, this same organization had become a regular partner of MATI and a prominent participant in forums on women’s economic empowerment, along with high officials in state agencies, municipal welfare bureaus, large philanthropic foundations, and BONPOs. Other social change and feminist organizations likewise continue to play an important role in the ongoing development of the field.
Hence the field of social economy produces somewhat unexpected encounters of actors with very different subject positions and identifications. A clear ideological and institutional opposition exists between people who are identified with the dominant political and economic systems and those who have made it their vocation to criticize and oppose these systems; nevertheless, individuals across the board have reason to engage each other in their quest to promote their projects. The distances between them therefore widen and narrow as they engage in overt disagreements or, conversely, as they discover social, professional, and sometimes even political affinities, or as personal careers carry individuals across from one arena to another.
As for funding, grassroots social-change organizations direct much of their fundraising efforts to private and public foundations outside the GONGOs and BONPOs, so that in at least part of their projects they may remain the sole visionaries, operators, and representatives. Characteristically, these are progressive Zionist foundations such as the New Israel Fund or particular Jewish federations, which define their mission as supporting human rights and a democratic culture, or non-Jewish international bodies that support minorities, women, workers’ unions, and the like. I mention some of these projects in Chapter 3, in a brief review of radical feminist initiatives that do not explicitly center on the economic issue. This pattern, moreover, is particularly characteristic of Palestinian organizations, which are less likely to receive support from state and related mainstream agencies. Although the target populations of such bodies now tend to include Arabs, their entitlement is limited to issues distinctly considered “apolitical,” a serious qualification as many of these Palestinian organizations have an explicitly political discourse and orientation.
However, when they operate projects in the more specific field of social economy, the vast majority of grassroots organizations work in close collaboration with larger, more mainstream bodies. Projects typically are run by clusters of partners, with one NGO usually acting as the main operator and the others varying in their degree of involvement.