Empowering a Community Leads to Remarkable Achievements: The Story of Birth to Bagrut
Below is a note sent by Steve Schwager, executive vice president and CEO of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), to members of JDC's board.
Representing JDC last week at UJA-Federation of New York’s stateside 10th anniversary celebration of their Birth to Bagrut program in Rehovot, I met a young man named Ashgaram Alame. He was among other Ethiopian-Israeli youth who had come to share their academic successes and their personal aspirations. Having graduated with honors near the top of his high school class this past year, Ashgaram is preparing to begin his army service as a combat soldier and is confident that afterward he will enroll in university to pursue a psychology degree and create a bright future for himself, his family, and his community.
This is a milestone that Ashgaram and his family never thought possible.
When the Alames made aliyah to Israel from Ethiopia, they fulfilled a lifetime's dream. But sadly, like so many from the Ethiopian-Israeli community, their transition to this vastly different country proved extremely difficult for the whole family, including Ashgaram, then only 4 years old.
These difficulties evolved into a chronic state of despair for Ashgaram, and by the time he entered seventh grade in his home city of Rehovot, he simply didn’t believe he could do well in school, and lacked the motivation to even try. At best, he hoped to achieve the bare minimum: to avoid dropping out of school and to complete 12 years of study — but without a high school matriculation certificate (bagrut).
Then JDC and UJA-Federation of New York got involved.
Ten years ago, we launched our PACT (Parents and Children Together) program in Rehovot to improve early-childhood services and support for the youngest Ethiopian-Israelis in this community. The launch in Rehovot followed a successful first pilot with the Jewish Federation of Cleveland a few years earlier in Israel’s southern region.
Seeing that within the first few years of the program most Ethiopian-Israeli children were gaining the skills to enter first grade on academic and developmental par with their peers, rather than behind them, we partnered with UJA-Federation of New York to build on this success in Rehovot. We expanded PACT in the city all the way until age 18 and renamed it Birth to Bagrut, reflecting the program’s ongoing support from early childhood through the completion of high school and earning a matriculation certificate.
The outcomes have been inspiring.
One key indicator of success is the matriculation rate at the end of the program’s journey. Birth to Bagrut has helped Rehovot’s Ethiopian-Israeli 12th graders achieve higher scores than the city’s veteran Israelis. Today, 62 percent of eligible Ethiopian-Israeli high school students in Rehovot receive their matriculation; this compares to a national Ethiopian-Israeli average of 40 percent and a citywide Rehovot result of 58 percent.
Talk about closing gaps.
Yet, as is often true in JDC’s experience, the process leading to this tremendous change has been as important as the end result. In this case, I am referring to the successful engagement of the Rehovot Ethiopian-Israeli community.
Although Birth to Bagrut was set up as a partnership between JDC, UJA-Federation, the Rehovot municipality, and the local Ethiopian-Israeli community, the community’s role at the start could have been described as passive, at best. Any willingness to be involved expressed by members of the community was often countered by voices of doubt, ambivalence, and even suspicion (probably a reflection of the difficulties they faced adjusting to the norms of Israel’s western society).
Nonetheless, JDC’s experience teaches the importance of engaging and collaborating with the communities we support — and so we persevered. We slowly gained the community’s trust as we proved our commitment to working together, and it paid off. Today, community representatives don’t only sit on program committees, they are the lay leaders running them and setting the agenda. In its quest to bolster Rehovot’s Ethiopian-Israeli children, Birth to Bagrut has become a valuable example of community partnership and empowerment.
Owing to this, Rehovot chose to mark its 120th anniversary by focusing on Birth to Bagrut’s successful decade as the highlight of immigrant absorption and integration in the city. Rehovot celebrated the program’s achievements at a gala event hosted by the local Ethiopian-Israeli community and attended by hundreds of residents, city leadership, JDC partner representatives, and senior UJA-Federation leadership. Optimism for the future was tangible.
Today, Ashgaram is one of more than 3,000 Rehovot children and youth who have a brighter future thanks to the support of UJA-Federation of New York. On behalf of our extended communal family, Irv [Smokler] and I are very proud of their success.