MIFTAH
Friday, 29 March. 2024
 
Your Key to Palestine
The Palestinian Initiatives for The Promotoion of Global Dialogue and Democracy
 
 
 

Twenty five members of MIFTAH's Palestinian Active Social and Political Youth Network completed a six-day training workshop last week through employing the KUMI methodology. The training is supported by the Norwegian and Irish Representative Offices. The workshop aimed at empowering youth towards active participation in the change and development process in Palestine at both the political and social levels.

For Ghassan Atawneh from Beit Kahel in the Hebron area and a Business Administration student at Al Quds Open University, the workshop provided them with new and useful information. Hanin Ramadan, a trainee lawyer from Nablus feels the same, saying she gained information and experience on the subject of developing and promoting the vision of the youth network through utilizing The KUMI methodology. She continued: "it helped the youth develop better awareness and knowledge about social topics and honed their ability to analyze and provide solutions".

“Through KUMI, we have started to build up the network’s goals based on determined needs,” says Atawneh. He indicated the importance of this workshop in shifting from theoretical to practical application of ideas. “This allows us to know just how much we benefited from the workshop and how applicable it is on the ground,” he says, “so we will be able to address our society and make change happen”. As an example, Atawneh said that the existing bodies for monitoring corruption were formed by appointment. “Therefore, all of our work was poured into finding a legal monitoring system that would be trusted and supported.” He says they now have a much broader understanding about corruption and possess part of the tools that help combat it.

Still, the biggest achievement, Atawneh believes came out of the workshop is that they, as a youth group from different social and educational backgrounds, were able to find a mutual space for action to address political and social issues. “This in itself is an achievement,” he says.

As for the intern lawyer Hanin Ramadan, who has volunteered in a number of organizations, MIFTAH’s KUMI-based training helped her to better analyze and understand issues around her, away from the traditional educational curriculum that is rigid and pre-prepared. She said the training gave her a broader understanding of the social issues and problems. “KUMI also helped me as a lawyer in training,” she said. “It helped me realize through my study of law, how insensible some of our laws really are, including those that legalize crimes instead of fighting them at the roots”.

On his part, facilitator Oday Abu Karsh said the training course created a value-based link between the participants and more enthusiasm toward achieving strategic approaches for combating corruption. He said it also gave the participants tools for analyzing deep-set cultural orders and legal frameworks that regulate the relationship between institutions and citizens, thus resulting in concepts that confront hierarchical and cultural violence. An example of this, he says, is fighting corruption. If the participants come out of the training with this methodological connection, he explains, they can build tremendous capacities for mobilization.

Project coordinator Shadi Zeidat believed the training was a completion of previous workshops with the purpose of sustaining and continuing collective action to achieve the goals and vision of the network and to develop a clear strategic action plan that specifies the vision and scope of work of the network. “We want to revive the potentials of the network’s members,” Zeidat says, “and get our house in order”.

He says that MIFTAH has achieved this objective during the six-day training sessions. Participants were able to develop a specific action framework through which the members of the network agreed to intensify interventions that are related to promoting the values of citizenship. They also agreed on the need to revive the role of the youth in this context. The second part of the task was to develop a clear plan of action to reflect upon the network’s strategic interventions that were developed at the end of last year.

Zeidat commended the youth network, saying that it had been very active in the field of combating corruption, namely through its partnership with the Palestinian Anti-Corruption Commission (PACC), which resulted in the development of the First Youth Strategic Interventions in Fighting Corruption in Palestine.

 
 
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