City-wide Strategy
Enhancing communality as a municipal strategy that encompasses all local authority elements and positions the municipal space as a generator of communality leads to a decrease in negative migration of youngsters and young families, to an aspiration for incoming migration while enhancing the sense of belonging, and to the development of community resilience – all through the experience of communality and quality connections among local inhabitants.
The Shahaf Foundation is currently in the process of implementing this program in the city of Bat-Yam, with more than ten other municipalities having shown an interest in joining the process.
The Shahaf Foundation, in cooperation with local authorities, runs a strategic program for the build-up of local communities and communality, which includes the establishment or consolidation of a community division within the local authority, while promoting such values as a local identity, a sense of belonging, local pride, solidarity, partnership and involvement.
"I get excited time and time again when I think about the road we took with the Shahaf Foundation and the partners along the way. From the establishment of a new community of local people in Mishkenot Amidar 5 years ago, through the establishment of a community division in the city in the last two years which has been promoting the community and communality issue in the city and now celebrating the establishment of 29 communities and tremendous community action in the city"
Rinat Gabbay, Community Division, Bat Yam Municipality