About Shatil and Civil Society

Shatil is the New Israel Fund’s Empowerment and Training Center for Social Change. Developing the capacity of civil society is fundamental to the future of a vibrant Israel and Shatil, now in its 25th year, plays a major and respected role, especially for organizations that are committed to social change. In any vibrant society with a growing and thriving nonprofit/third sector, there will be a wide diversity of views and positions, perhaps more so in Israel. Shatil contributes constructively to the vital civil society functions in Israel. In the U.S. we just assume a central role for non-profit community organizations. Such free associations are part of the fabric of American society, as described by de Tocqueville, where one of the founding principles was to limit the role of government, opening space for free citizens to gather to address their needs. The founding dynamic in Israel contrasts, with a strong central government absorbing most of the functions of the pre-independence state, when the Jewish Agency for Palestine acted as a shadow government during the British Mandate, before becoming the government. The Jewish Agency for Israel retained a few functions such as immigration. Over the past 20 years, with the growth of the economy and in many areas the retraction of government, a space has opened up for civil society and there are well over 20,000 nonprofits or amutot. The many accomplishments of Shatil are well described on its website. My main interest was to gain better understanding of the collaborations between Shatil and other organizations engaged in capacity building. For example, one component of Sheatufim is to provide services and consultation to enhance the capacity of nonprofit organizations. Shatil applies a set of criteria to determine whether they can work with an organization—mainly does the organization work within one of its three overall goals and is working for social change—so there are many organizations that would not fit within their mission. Sheatufim, on the other hand, is willing to engage with most organizations, in its more general mission.