Projects at various development stages from School for Peace alumni were presented at the annual conference in June 2024

In the previous alumni conferences (in 2022 and 2023), we held an award ceremony to support selected alumni projects with financial grants. This started with a call for proposals several months before the conference, and a few projects were selected by an external judging panel from those submitted for the grant. Each year, 4-7 projects were chosen to receive grants of several thousand shekels. The alumni whose projects were selected came to the conference and presented their projects to the audience in the closing session of the conference. Providing grants and presenting projects at the conference aim to meet two important objectives of the School for Peace: [1] to keep supporting our graduates after they have completed the course with us, in order to help them in their reality-changing activity, and [2] to provide a platform to showcase alumni projects and inspire other alumni to join existing projects or initiate their own.

This year, we decided to conduct the project selection process differently. Instead of an external judging panel selecting a limited number of projects, we wanted to give special support to our new alumni and projects in their early stages. While the projects that usually won were mature projects that would have taken place even without our financial grant, we wanted to support the more delicate stages of project development, the initial stages where, without the right foundation, the project might not continue. The process included a call for proposals from alumni with a project idea they wanted to implement or a project in its early stages, with an emphasis on recent alumni from the past year’s courses. Later, we allowed more veteran alumni to join. The project is led by two facilitators from the School for Peace, Rose Amer and Maytal Strul, and will include a “hackathon” in September – a concentrated day of project development.

During the conference, seven alumni projects were presented: five in the closing panel on Saturday and two at the beginning of the conference.

At the beginning of the conference, Merav Ulyansky, an alumna of the 2023-2024 Environmental Justice course, presented a position paper she wrote together with other alumni from the course: Nahida Sakis, Ya’ara Peretz, Yair Dvir, Aseel Agha. The “Position Paper on Climate Justice and Against the War In Gaza” was sent to Israeli environmental organizations and seeks to connect justice for Palestinians with environmental justice. The position paper was sent to conference participants in Hebrew and Arabic and can be read in English here.

Following them, Nashwa Alrifahie, who led the photography exhibition project “Mish ‘Adi” (translation: “Not Normal”) along with Michal Mudrik, Yael Ranel Filus, Mahasen Abd Alhadi all alumni of the 2023-2024 Environmental Justice course, presented their project. The photography exhibition, initiated with several women from Lod, documented environmental hazards in their everyday lives in their immediate surroundings, with each photo accompanied by a personal story and explanation of the issue depicted. The exhibition was hung in the gallery at Neve Shalom What al-Salam in collaboration with Dyana Shaloufi Rizek, the gallery director, and remained there for a few days after the conference. It is now touring other locations across the country. For more information about the exhibition, click here.

Projects presented in the conference panel:

1. Multicultural Performing Arts Community / Einat Betsalel / Alumna of Mixed Cities 2023-2024. This is a unique roaming residency program in collaboration with several local cultural centers. The main goal of the residency is to provide a space for intercultural dialogue alongside personal and collective artistic research, leading to joint pluralistic cultural creation that will contribute to the wider artistic field within the local-geographical-historical context. The artists work in various performing arts fields such as dance, theatre, visual arts, cinema, performance, poetry, music, and more.
   
2. Will Return / Inas Osrof Abu Seif / Alumna of Mixed Cities 2023-2024. The project will investigate ownership of houses in Jaffa from before 1948. After verifying the research and documentation, a ceramic plaque will be created to indicate details about the house, such as the family’s name who lived there, the names of the family members, and when they were expelled.
   
3. Cultural Action Against the War / Hadas Emma Kedar / Alumna of Dialogue Europe 2023. A group of Israeli artists and filmmakers living in various parts of the world aims to create cultural and artistic actions in public spaces and/or online in response to the events in Gaza.
   
4. Conflict Theatre / Hisham Suleiman / Alumnus of the Performing Arts and Screen course 2020. An improvisation group that explores the topic of conflict and will build a performance around it. The group operates within the framework of establishing a creator house – a new center for culture and arts in the heart of the old market in Nazareth by the Tiatro Association.
   
5. Photographic Disillusionment Portrait / Liora Szylman / Alumna of the Journalism course 2010. A project in the research phase, focusing on Rimona, an activist who grew up as a settler and her story of maturing and disillusionment from Zionism.
   

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