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News from the Region

Letting Young People Decide

The Popular Achievement Quaker Palestine Youth Program in the West Bank and Gaza

By Quaker Palestine Youth Program - West Bank Team

All over the West Bank and Gaza, small clusters of young people are meeting together and thinking about how they can help solve their communities’ problems. In one refugee camp, the teenagers chose to hold a clean-up day and lobby the local leadership to install garbage cans in the streets. In another West Bank town, the youth built a library – constructing shelves from donated scrap lumber, collecting books from various civil society organizations, and plying the conscience of a local landowner for the library space.

“I have started to think about my life, and about the choices I have,” says a girl from the Ramallah-area village of Rafat after only six sessions of the Popular Achievement Quaker Palestine Youth Program. “These meetings have made me ask questions and to think about my role in the community – that life is more than going to school and coming home.”

Popular achievement coaches meet during a training held in Ramallah in May, 2005. Photo: Itaf Zahaykeh Masry

Popular Achievement, modeled after the US program Public Achievement, trains “coaches” culled from university student volunteers who are required to do 100 hours of community service, local grassroots organizations and in some cases other non-governmental organizations. After six months of training, the coaches then go out to 22 locales in the West Bank and 21 in the Gaza Strip to attract interested young people, aged 14-17. In their weekly meetings, they discuss civics, citizenship and individual power. Eventually, each group of students is asked to decide what it wants to do to aid its community and how it wants to get there.

The coaches, young people themselves, find the program unique in its emphasis on action. “We hear a lot of our leaders talking about theory and politics,” says Saleh Dawabshe, a coach and second-year student at Birzeit University. “But here the kids are actually implementing their ideas. That is why I think this program is important and why I chose to pursue it.” Coaches and participants are encouraged to use the safe space of Popular Achievement to combine their real-world experience, creative ideas and individual skills to initiate projects that will benefit them and the wider community. In a nutshell, Popular Achievement encourages young people to practice being citizens.

Coaches like Saleh are trained in basic facilitation skills, critical thinking and conflict resolution techniques, as well as the core concepts of Popular Leadership itself: defining a problem, researching possible resolutions, making an action plan and then implementing it. During this process, both coaches and the teens learn to work together in groups, exercise leadership skills, cultivate volunteerism and gain experience with negotiating and following up with various local leadership bodies. These steps have proven to be both liberating and challenging for the participants as they think critically about and act on what happens in their world.

In some cases, the program has changed attitudes. One 16-year-old from Yabad village, famous for its coal production and plagued by high rates of cancer, sat smoking brazenly during a team meeting. After discussion led by his coach, however, the same boy drew a “no smoking” sign on a piece of cardboard and hung it in the meeting room.

The program is not without its obstacles. Program facilitators point to the innumerable Israeli travel restrictions as the primary difficulty; with core groups located all over the West Bank and Gaza, getting the groups together, visiting coaches and holding proper training is often difficult. At times, target communities themselves are resistant to the introduction of unknown influences (particularly because the program is foreign and American). The interaction between boys and girls during the program has periodically caused friction with the larger community, although in several cases the teens themselves managed to win over critical parents and local leaders.

Importantly, the program has created a space for young men to engage in productive civic activities, and for young women to pursue interests outside the home. In a 2003 program evaluation, one father said he observed marked changes in the behavior of her daughter after her participation in the program. “She didn’t used to discuss anything at home; her brothers were dominating her because they are older…There’s about four or five years between them, and because they are all grown-ups together, they were erasing her character - but not any more.” The Popular Achievement coaches are evenly split along gender, and about forty percent of the teens themselves are girls.

The project began in 2003, with a pilot phase of four months, and is slated to run until 2007. The American Friend’s Service Community’s Regional Office in Amman developed the Palestine project after observing a similar program in Northern Ireland that brought together Protestant and Catholic youth in leadership groups to emphasize their similarities. While the growing physical barriers between Palestinian and Israeli young people, as well as a climate of persistent inequality, make it difficult to pursue that same kind of bilateral leadership model on the ground, AFSC is seeking to build internal youth leadership in Palestine.

This is especially important here, says the program staff, because Palestine is lacking in natural resources, while 60 percent of Palestinians are under the age of 18. According to one coordinator: “The majority of our nation is youth – and that is our potential.”

In a breezeblock classroom in the West Bank village of Rafat, one can see that potential at work. Like most Palestinian villages, Rafat’s school is sparse - four peeling walls protecting a crowd of metal chairs. A series of flawed English sentences demonstrating the passive tense is scrawled on the chalkboard. And from every window, one can see an earthen scar where Israel has laid a cordon of patrol roads and barbed wire around the houses of Rafat.

But the young people of Rafat respond eagerly to their coach, Saleh, as he tells them stories that exemplify the challenges that they face in their lives. The five girls and two boys watch as he acts out the lives of two young men, one quiet and introverted, and the other a popular busybody. “Which one of these two people will be able to cope better with the problems in society?” Saleh asks.

There is no right answer, as is soon made clear by the students’ ready explanations and outcomes for both of the boys’ behavior. But it is obvious that these teens are thinking carefully about what kind of person they want to be. “This program is about power,” Saleh concludes, “about you fulfilling your own power and making decisions as a group. We will do here what you decide.”

These young people are already making adult decisions – one boy works construction when he is not in school. Another girl in the group will soon be married; yet another is considering abandoning her studies entirely. The goal of Popular Achievement program is to give these young people the confidence and analytical tools they need right now - and practice in using them for the future.

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