“Breathing a sigh of relief at the center of power”
Breath of Relief at the Otzma Center is a system of responses designed to improve the situation of families living in prolonged poverty and social exclusion in a variety of areas of life, while creating social mobility and increasing resources.
This system is based on the activities of power centers in the local authorities and offers a holistic solution for the families of service recipients, including a combination of social-emotional responses and material and financial responses, accompanying and providing extensive knowledge in the process of economic rehabilitation of the family, increasing the realization of rights, and more.
The system operates in 113 municipalities throughout the country and is operated in partnership with the Ministry of Social Affairs and Social Security, the Joint Distribution Committee and the Rashi Foundation.
In the past two years, the response system has been expanded to include a number of additional programs, including: the Mapa program – Families Meet Opportunity, the “Breathing Soldiers” program for intervention with soldiers and NCOs and their families living in poverty, the Breath of Relief program for single/single-parent families, and the array of risk programs – aimed at families in which children are at risk and neglect.
The broad array includes two sub-programs:
Breathing a sigh of relief
A program aimed at advancing the situation of families living in poverty and exclusion by providing emotional support and providing an array of intensive and varied responses for a limited period of two years.
The program’s families are accompanied by the partnership of a social worker, a designated family, family accompaniments and a flexible basket of responses. This support network is available to the family in the process of defining and achieving its goals.
Power Center
A service that operates within the social services departments, whose goal is to make solutions accessible to individuals and families living in poverty and exclusion, so that each according to his needs and options can improve his quality of life and participate in social processes in the community. The service operates under the leadership of a multidisciplinary team and under the management of a dedicated social worker (the center’s coordinator) with whom the social worker works for the realization of rights and the community and accompanies Otzma.
The center has a system of group responses aimed at meeting a variety of service recipients’ needs, as well as a designated budget for individual responses in the field of economic-occupational rehabilitation.
The service includes personal, group and community accompaniment – in-depth and quality social worker and accompaniment and provides as holistic a response as possible that combines several axes of intervention:
- Employment – assistance and guidance in finding employment, employment empowerment.
- Exercising rights – accompaniment, provision of knowledge and realization of rights.
- Managing the family budget – building a budget and settling debts.
- Work at the community level and in the field of policy change processes according to the needs of service recipients.
- Improving basic living conditions.
paamonim activity as part of “Breath of Relief”
Paamonim is the body that operates the system explained above in the Jerusalem District. The localities included in the program’s activities in the district are: Jerusalem, Ashkelon, Ashdod, Beit Shemesh, Ma’ale Adumim, Mateh Binyamin, Kiryat Malachi, Beitar Illit, Modi’in Illit.
As part of the operation of the system, Paamonim is the organization that employs the district regional administration, the team of area coordinators and the family escort team in the district, which numbers about 75 family escorts. He also coordinates and leads all the activities of the partners in the district while implementing the system’s policy as determined by the Ministry of Social Affairs and Social Security, JDC-Israel and the Rashi Foundation. All this is done in partnership with the representatives of the district ministry and in the spirit of the poverty-aware social work paradigm.
The families and service recipients of the Division are located at the center of the intervention out of the belief of looking at the family as a system of the whole world and constitute full and active partners in all intervention processes and at all levels, both individual, group and community.
Paamonim sees its choice to operate the “Breath of Relief at the Otzma Center” system as a welcome opportunity to take a significant part in leading processes of change among the families of the system and social services departments, and in in-depth processes in improving the face of Israeli society.
