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Kol Ha Isha ("Women's Voice") is a grassroots organisation run by an ethnically diverse staff and board of directors. Together with volunteers and interns, the Kol Ha Isha community includes Ethiopian, Mizrachi, Ashkenazi, Russian and eventually also Palestinian women. Since its beginnings in 1994, the organisation has been striving to develop and promote a feminist, multicultural model of social change and to empower women by providing a variety of services and culturally enriching activities that address the self-defined needs of the participating women. Women come together at Kol ha Isha to engage in dialogue, to initiate and/or participate in empowerment groups, to expose each other to various ideas and cultures, to advocate for their common issues, to advance their diverse agendas and to learn from one another. The Heinrich Boell Foundation has supported Kol Ha Isha since 1995.
- The most promising and ambitious programme recently launched by Kol Ha Isha is a Community School for Women's education and economic development. This 'school without walls' brings the classroom to women in low-income neighbourhoods in major cities as well as in small villages and development towns. The project started its first courses in Beersheva, teaching 18 Bedouin women in Women's studies and in using computers. At this point, the "Community School without walls" is the only vehicle within Kol Ha Isha through which Palestinian women can get involved in project work. Courses are supposed to take place throughout Israel wherever the need occurs; rising the chance for Palestinian women to run these courses in Arabic towns and villages, too.
- Kol Ha Isha runs a Resource and Referral Center, which offers peer counselling for crisis intervention and accompaniment to rabbinical courts. It refers to lawyers and psychologists who are specialised in and particularly sensitive to the women's needs. The Center hands out information on legal and civil rights as well as source material and it offers mediation services and employment readiness sessions. More than 2000 women visited the Center last year using the services provided.
Kol Ha Isha runs a Women's Activist Gallery named Antea. It is the only women's activist project that combines educational and consciousness raising programmes with exhibitions of art work by women artists. Some of their previous exhibits include "Rage and Resolution", different women's perspectives on domestic violence, and women's art that dealt with issues of self-identity, racism and colonialism/ post-colonialism.
Homepage: http://www.kolhaisha.israel.net/
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