Projects
Mend: A Brief History

In just seven years, since October 1998, Mend has become the
leading Palestinian nonviolence organization. Working now
with an active nonviolence network in nine cities and a further
eleven libraries/rural community centres, with teams of trained
youth “Menders”, in addition to the hundreds of adult
volunteers, and a nationwide radio soap opera, Mend began
with two groundbreaking educational projects, outreach
educational materials for Shara’ Simsim (Sesame Street), and a
series of experimental workshops with twelve schools,
“Strengthening Nonviolence in Jerusalem”.

Mend’s approach from the outset has been participatory and
innovative, from its very first day of work, with a multi-sector
workshop to explore the problems of violence in schools and
potential creative solutions, and during the first year working
with an entire class of forty-four children in Qalandia boys’
primary school writing and producing a play, that was
subsequently performed in the Palestine National Theatre and
in summer camps around the West Bank. Mend’s work with
schools has been consistently holistic and reinforcing, involving
trainings for the entire staff, including the principal, as well as
working with the most difficult class in each school.

Before Mend was one year old, it was already starting on a
major project with a staff of eleven United Nations volunteers,
working with seven schools in the rural West Bank. “Choose a
Future”. This project involved developing a curriculum and
training fourteen teachers and 150 girls in fields from
reproductive health and realizing dreams, to conflict resolution
and participatory video. This rapidly consolidated Mend as a
leading Palestinian NGO working closely both with the Ministry
of Education and the UNRWA.

During the summer of 1999, still within its first year, Mend
organized a small but pioneering summer camp, “Youth Living
with Conflict”, in the West Bank village of Jifna, for Palestinians
from the West Bank and black South Africans, where they were
all trained together in nonviolence, in internet
communications, and in film making, while they shared their
experiences of conflict via drama and art. Mend went on to
hold two more summer camps after this in a similar model, but
larger, and including children from the North of Ireland and from
Kenya. The validation of sharing their experiences of conflict
had a major transformative effect on the children. Though the
camps could not be continued as even Jerusalem became too
dangerous, many of the children stayed in touch with each
other, and the last year of the summer camp developed into a
group pf youth volunteers for nonviolence, “Menders”, with
their own quarterly newsletter, “Impact”. The final day of the
last camp in Jerusalem was celebrated by a release of balloons
all over the world at the same time as in Jerusalem (in South
Africa, Ireland etc. and in refuge camps in Lebanon)

Later that year, on the eve of the millennium, Mend organized a
week long residential  international group relations conference
in Jericho in conjunction with the leading French NGO in this
field; the International Forum for Social Innovation.

With the sudden return to violent conflict in September 2000,
Mend turned the nonviolence work with schools to urgently
needed counseling and crisis management, training teachers
and children, preparing a booklet of guidelines for adolescents,
and establishing libraries as an after-school/summer project to
keep children as safe as possible. Some of the girls from the
“Choose a Future” project set up an emergency clinic in their
village (Silwad) and arranged for donations of medicines and
doctors’ time. MEND was one of very few NGOs at the time that
refused to be daunted and continued to work everywhere
despite the dangerous conditions at the time.
Mend also refused to part of the tendency to polarization and
dehumanization, and therefore distributed the controversial
Shara Simsim (Sesame Street) educational materials (that
amongst other things promoted mutual respect between
Palestinian and Israeli children) all over the West Bank and the
Gaza Strip. MEND continued working with the Truman Institute
of the Hebrew University in co-facilitation training, and in
promoting cooperation among women towards active
nonviolence.

MEND continued work with children and schools, expanding the
schools programme around Ramallah and Bethlehem, and
organized a prototype workshop and art project, “Stones for
the Future of Palestine” in refugee camps and schools. MEND
also started organizing volunteer activities for youth in the
Ramallah area and set up a safe play area there.

From early 2000, MEND developed its work with participatory
video with two films, one in Yatta and one with Halhul, both in
conjunction with the local micro-regional planning
committees, and then carried it further via “Empowering
Women via Nonviolence Traning and Participatory Video” (a
project through the UNIFEM Trust Fund) a project that started to
consolidate MEND’s method of empowering women, and
whose films have been shown all over the world.

As the conflict escalated, Mend intervened more actively, by
creating a series of “Bumper Stickers for Rationality” with
slogans in Arabic and English and Hebrew and English, designed
to remind people on both sides of the conflict of their common
humanity (e.g. “What about our children?” Mend also
intervened with publications to help in the emergency situation
in the aftermath of the Israeli incursions in the spring of 2002;
one page bullet-pointed guidelines on eg: how to help children
cope with the trauma of the violence; basic first aid; etc.

Up till this point Mend had been working with the youth and the
women, not with the mainstream Palestinian population.
However with the deteriorating situation, an increasing need
was developing among Palestinians for a new approach, and
MEND received requests from key mainstream activists to give
them trainings in active nonviolence. MEND therefore moved
into full gear, consolidating and expanding, and has started
over the past three years to work to build up a strong active
nonviolence network, via a series of trainings in each location,
voluntary work, support and affinity groups, and now youth
groups of Menders as well.

As MEND’s work has grown, so have the sectors of the
community that it reaches and that now reinforce each other.  
The original work with schools has developed into a project
with the Ministry of Education, training school counselors in
nonviolence and conflict resolution, which will ultimately reach
throughout the school system. The younger generation is
reached by a new set of Sesame materials, “Sesame Stories”,
which includes this time Public Service Announcements and
teachers’ training in the use of the materials. The series was
given a successful high-profile launch in early November 2005.
The radio soap opera, “Home is our Home”, reaches the youth
and now has a curriculum for use by teachers and by Mend’s
ANV centres.

MEND has started to reach out regionally via an international
consultation for women from the Middle East on nonviolence,
held in Cyprus in September 2004, with women from as far afield
as Afghanistan and Morocco. MEND also in 2004 took thirty
Palestinian youth to Cyprus to learn about another people in
conflict and in 2005 took another, smaller group to Berlin for a
summer camp focusing on peer mediation.