A particularly popular component in the projects is entrepreneurship. To clarify, unlike the UN-supported development industry, in the Israeli social-economy field, microenterprise, while popular, is not the only or even the most prevalent form of action. For example, of the sixteen programs reported on the website of the Special Projects Fund of Israel’s National Insurance Institute in 2013, under the rubric “integrating women in the workforce” only seven had “entrepreneurship” in their title (I explain the role of this institution in the next section). A higher proportion, fifteen out of thirty projects, emerged in the Van Leer Research Group Survey, one of the five primary sources of this book, where we explicitly sought out projects that did entrepreneurship. The scope of microlending, moreover, is smaller still, with one important agency, the Koret Israel Economic Development Funds (KIEDF), which works primarily with Bedouins and new immigrants, and a handful of much smaller projects that operate among asylum seekers and work migrants. According to Kemp and Berkovitch (2013), between 2006 and 2009 KIEDF provided a total of 2,280 microloans, of them more than half to Bedouin women. Other existing foundations, by contrast, set requirements and charge costs, which are too high for typical women microentrepreneurs, the result being that women comprise only a third of their clientele (Kemp and Berkovitch 2013). Nevertheless, the idea of entrepreneurship has come to be perceived as an important general work skill, even in projects that focus on helping women find paid employment, communicating the message that whether salaried or self-employed, people must be able continuously to rebrand and market themselves to succeed in today’s dynamic workforce.
Characteristically, the personnel operating the projects include project managers, coordinators, fundraisers, and women whose main occupation is to teach the courses. A relatively high proportion among them are Palestinian and Mizrahi women, and some men, for whom the social-economy field offers new and exciting career paths. Typically, the lecturers, group moderators, and economic consultants who do the actual teaching of the courses, and who subsequently accompany their low-income clients in their business ventures, are freelancers with two major types of expertise. They have a background in finance, accountancy, business management, human resource management, and related themes; or they have worked as facilitators of group-dynamics sessions in feminist circles, Arab-Jewish dialogue programs, or support groups for welfare recipients. Another important type of expertise is legal knowledge, sought particularly in organizations that engage in lobbying, policy initiatives, and legal support. Last but not least, the field also engages actors whose main expertise is knowledge production, to develop operational models and evaluate impact, or to work as action researchers.
Cross-sectorial Partnerships
Organizationally, the projects commonly operate as partnerships of several bodies, often combining nonprofit civil society organizations, state or municipal agencies, private philanthropists, and representatives from the business community. So at the grassroots level, the partners are often nongovernmental organizations firmly rooted in the arena of women’s rights, minority rights, and social change activism. Alternatively, they may be less ideological nonprofit organizations affiliated with local or national establishments, with previous experience in tender-age education, women’s health, and the like, who have directed some or most of their activity to the economic empowerment of women. These organizations raise funds for each project, and the type of funding dictates the degree to which they operate alone or in collaboration. Usually projects are operated through dense networks of local and national partners, with funding from international donors or national benefactors, or both. Typical partners are local municipalities and their various subsidiaries (community centers, welfare bureaus, Neighborhood Renewal agencies), state ministries (notably the Ministry of Industry, Trade and Labor [MITL], the Welfare, and the Immigration Absorption Ministries), other state agencies (Special Project Fund of the National Insurance Institute, Authority for Small and Middle-Size Businesses, Centers for Fostering Entrepreneurship called MATI, or several authorities within the Prime Minister’s Office), actors from the business community, and large Zionist foundations that function as semiprivate extensions of the state.
Since the establishment of Israel, large Zionist foundations have played a major role in the development and operation of the state’s social and economic infrastructure. Actors such as the Jewish Agency, the Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), the Jewish National Fund, the Rothschild Foundation, the Rashi Foundation, and others have been heavily involved in the development of new communities around the country. This longstanding outsourcing of state responsibilities to such bodies, which are explicitly committed to enhance Jewish and Zionist goals, and which as private bodies are not bound by the criteria of universal redistribution, has been strongly criticized as an institutional form of state discrimination (Kretzmer 1990). However, these lines of national exclusion seem to have loosened somewhat with the recent involvement of these bodies in economic empowerment and antipoverty schemes. Having rearticulated their interpretation of “democratic strength” to include reducing inequalities between Jews and Arabs, these foundations have become important partners in projects that target Palestinian citizens.
One prominent characteristic of the involvement of large Zionist foundations in the social-economy field is their tendency to be active partners, as opposed to detached donors. For this purpose, some of them establish large nonprofit organizations that work in close collaboration with state ministries on the one hand, and with civil society organizations on the other. One such organization, which fits the description of what Ardhana Sharma (2006) called a government organized NGO (GONGO), is Tevet (Hebrew acronym for tnufa be-ta’asuka, “momentum in employment”). Established in 2005 as a joint project of JDC Israel and the MITL, Tevet aims to increase the workforce participation of men and women from five socially vulnerable categories in particular: young people with no family support, new immigrants, Arabs, ultra-Orthodox Jews, and people with mental disabilities. Tevet’s main mission is to enhance expert knowledge on workforce participation of such populations, through developing courses, textbooks, and operational models, and then training personnel in different civil society organizations on how to implement it. In the present research, Tevet figured repeatedly in its capacity as senior partner in several of the projects that I studied and as a highly influential actor in the field generally.
Another important actor of a slightly different character is the Special Projects Fund of the National Insurance Institute, the central state agency responsible for all social benefits. This fund, which defines itself as a future social hothouse, “aims to support and encourage experimental welfare services for at-risk groups and people with particular needs, such as battered women, dysfunctional families, released prisoners … job seekers, street dwellers, and more.”10 In 2013 the Special Project Fund, which acted as a strategic partner in two of the projects in which I did fieldwork for this study, reported twenty-one active welfare-to-work programs, all addressing women or adolescent girls—again, over a wide range of “disempowered” groups.
As mentioned, a different source of funding in the field is the business community, which has shown increasing interest in social entrepreneurship. Several recent millionaires from the high-tech, financial, and industrial sectors have established foundations, sometimes forming attached nonprofit organizations (NPOs) or channeling the funds directly to existing NPOs, to combat poverty and social inequalities through promoting education, employment, and well-being in the periphery. These tycoons characteristically see themselves as working for the national good, and they have a sense of obvious entitlement to talk directly to policy and decision makers inside the state system as well as among Zionist donors, offering generous matching if the government agrees to invest in enterprises they deem important. They are just as keen to work directly with grassroots actors on account of their presumed hands-on experience and because they are perceived as a way to bypass the ponderous state bureaucracy.
An example of a business-organized nonprofit organization (BONPO) is Be’atsmi (Hebrew, “By Myself”). This organization, established in 1995, is sup-ported primarily by private businesses (including a bank, several large industrial and financial concerns, and middle-range and small firms) and philanthropic foundations,