To face the critical challenges of
preventing youth from ending up in poverty and facing underachievement and
crime, ENP launched both a Scholastic Assistance Program as well as a Youth
Outreach Center in Tirat Carmel. The ENP Scholastic Assistance Program
provides supplementary hours of educational support to students in grades 7 to
12 in order to strengthen their achievements. 85 Ethiopian-Israeli teenagers
are currently a part of the scholastic assistance program. This program would
not be such a wonderful success without the generous support of the Jewish
Federation of Greater Pittsburgh. The goals of the program are to:
• Increase the number of students
matriculating and improve the level of achievement on the matriculation exams.
• Improve academic achievement in the years
leading up to matriculation.
• Reduce the numbers dropping out of
normative, educational frameworks and the extent of hidden dropouts.
• Strengthen students’ motivation to study as
well as their self-confidence in their abilities.
After school, Ethiopian-Israeli youth can
go to the ENP Youth Outreach Center. Nowadays, the center provides around 50
teenagers with a variety of enriching, creative, and empowering
extra-curricular activities. In addition, this center:
• Encourages the teens to take on responsibilities for
different tasks at the Center, enabling them to feel a greater sense of
ownership and to give them a chance to actualize their leadership potential.
• Offers youth a wholesome, supportive, and safe place
to socialize.
• Encourages personal growth, higher aspirations for
the future, greater self-confidence, and improved interpersonal skills by
providing workshops and activities such as soccer, music and leadership.
•
Provides workshops in areas such as violence prevention, strengthening
self-image, and personal identity.
Assistance is also provided to the parents to help them understand and
deal with the additional struggle of coping with raising youth in Israel.
Did you know that…
The teens of Tirat Carmel feel that the Youth
Outreach Center is like a second home, and many attend on a daily basis. In
fact, when the devastating forest fires occurred in 2010 near Tirat Carmel
and forced many to evacuate their homes, the teenagers led their families
across town to the shelter of the Center and resided there over the entire
Shabbat, even when offered alternative shelters.