Community Advocacy, established in 1993, has been working in the Beersheva area since its beginning. Current projects in the Beersheva district, include the Storefront Advocacy Center, activities for new immigrants, home outreach visits, Community Organizational activities, the Beersheva Food Cooperative, the H.E.T.Z. advocacy forum for universal Dental Care, the Bedouin Mobile Rights Advocacy Center, Bedouin Outreach Points, and the Bedouin Water Rights Forum.

The scope of these activities continues to expand. More and more individuals are turning to Community Advocacy for assistance either by professional staff members or the growing number of volunteers. Many of these new clients arrive after participating in activities for new immigrants or through outreach activities in the neighborhood. Others return having previously used the above services when needing assistance with additional problems.

The Beersheva Storefront Advocacy Center is our center of operations, providing an anchor for our work in the community. It serves as our initial contact point for hundreds of residents who walk in off the street with specific problems. As a result of this interaction we gain the opportunity to develop relationships with residents who later become volunteers and activists who became actively involved in mobilizing others to support our work in the community. Among the variety of services we provide in the Storefront, guaranteeing that people are able to acquire, up-to-date information about existing social and economic rights, and increasing their ability to access those rights is our primary goal. 

Specific goals of the storefront are to enable disadvantaged families in the Dalet and bordering neighborhoods to access entitlements and services relating to basic social and rights and entitlements, such as housing, health, welfare, national insurance, home services for the elderly, debts, education and municipal services. The objectives of the Storefront are to demystify rights and entitlements by providing accessible information, expertise and legal counseling; To teach self-advocacy skills to disadvantaged neighborhood residents, empowering them to access entitlements; To develop the volunteer potential of disadvantaged communities from a variety of backgrounds to enable them to work together across their differences to change public policy.

In 2007 we handled 3,246 complaints at the storefront. Many dealt with matters of personal finance, debts, bailiffs, and claims. Others were about the National Insurance Institute, public housing, and consumer issues such as banks, insurance, and purchase problems. The remaining were spread over a variety of topics. An interesting item is that 88 complaints (2.7%) were about rights of Holocaust survivors. We held 14 legal clinics during the year, which offered assistance to 85 clients. Seven new volunteers were trained and began to work in the center during 2007. Three social events and one tour were arranged for activists and the volunteers during the year, including a tour to Jerusalem.

G  Back to Storefront Advocacy Centers