Matte Asher
Background
Matte Asher is a regional authority in the Western Galilee, covering the area north of Haifa up to the Lebanon border. It includes 32 rural villages, moshavim and kibbutzim, including two Bedouin villages. This is Itach Maaki’s first program with a regional authority, rather than an urban municipality.
The Work Process
City for All in Matte Asher focuses on the central theme of combating gender based violence. The program will be a two-year program, and will be funded half by the municipality and half by Itach-Ma’aki donors. This is the first time that the municipality will be paying a full 50% of the costs, furthering the scalability of the City for All program.
Efforts to combat gender based violence in Matte Asher will focus on three strategies:
- Education
- Prevention, enforcement and rehabilitation services
- Public campaigning.
For each of these strategies we will be holding public consultations, seeking out representatives from diverse minority populations to participate in the consultations and establishing a local lead team.
Impact
A memorandum of understanding between Itach Maaki and the municipality has already been established, and planning has begun together with the Matte Asher Mayoral Advisor for Gender Equality, Yael Shavit and other municipal workers and committees.
The Head of the Authority (equivalent to the mayor), Moshe Davidovitch, has already committed to being a part of the lead team for the City for All program. We also have two additional partners who will play specific roles in the Matte Asher program: the Public Knowledge Workshop (HaSadna) will conduct work on data collection and analysis to get a proper mapping of the area, and the Institute for Democracy Education will be participating in the education part of the program.