But if they are successfully framed as “social,” then tolerance is claimed under the justification that these are legitimate democratic practices/discourses (see also Al-Haj 1995).
Given this semantic resonance, one may understand why the local version of community economic development is called social economy. As I show in the following sections, the incorporation of CED-related ideas into the Israeli context has been filtered through the intricate intersections of ethnic, national, class, and gender hierarchies. The attempts to mainstream potentially radical ideas about social justice and better integration of marginalized populations have required delicate packaging and sophisticated negotiation. Against this background, the calming timbre of “the social” is a good indication of the shape this new discourse of civic entitlement and economic justice is taking.
The Israeli Field of Social Economy
Social economy, then, can be said to stand for bottom-up poverty-reducing efforts that offer an alternative to routine state-centered approaches to economic development. Contrary to the old socialism, the discourse taking shape around social economy can accommodate collective ideas of social justice with individual desires for well-being. It sees enterprise and business development as a lever for growth, not as an inevitable source of social malfunction. It fosters work with and not against the economic sector, with and not against the government. It contains ideas of success, happiness, and wealth for everyone. It also gives greater weight than the old socialism to individuals’ agency, wishes, and responsibility.
Projects and the People Who Operate Them
Since the late 1990s and increasingly in the 2000s, Israel started to fill up with semiprivatized, NGO-led programs aiming to better the economic situation of groups in the social and geographical periphery, with particular, though not exclusive, emphasis on women.9 The projects commonly target women from marked populations, notably Arab, Jewish ultra-Orthodox, migrants from Ethiopia or the former USSR, as well as Mizrahi women from poor neighborhoods. Far fewer projects target men (primarily Jewish ultra-Orthodox, Arab, or new immigrants) and youth. The overarching aim of most projects is to enhance the economic situation of members of these groups, by giving them occupational training, either specific or general, boosting their self-confidence, and increasing their overall ability to negotiate their way in the workforce. By my estimate, in 2015 economic empowerment projects across Israel number several hundreds. They range from very localized and small-scale courses to well-oiled and heavily financed projects that train hundreds and even thousands of participants yearly and operate in several locations simultaneously. Some programs are sectorial, targeting women from particular ethnic, religious, or language groups, while others are more inclusive. Adriana Kemp and Nitza Berkovitch (2013) estimate the number of low-income women who participated in the various projects in the field so far at 17,000.
Training courses are by far the most popular form of action in these projects. Themes usually include computer skills, marketing, product development, writing CVs, and Hebrew. These may then be supplemented by more specific branch-related topics, such as training as an assistant in tender-age education or as a secretary at insurance agencies, acquiring particular technical skills, or marketing and business management (in microentrepreneurship projects). Along with this teaching component all the programs without exception have a component called “dynamic” (short for group dynamics). This is moderated group discussion, in which the trainees are invited to reveal their feelings, fears, and innermost dreams, as they stand at the threshold of becoming income-generating, “productive” members of society. As I discuss at length in Chapter 3, this effort to boost the participants’ self-esteem, generally referred to as “empowerment,” is at once a key scenario in the social-economy field and the locus of some of its major paradoxes. Other types of activities taking place in the field, in addition to training and empowerment courses, are litigation, protest, unionizing, legal and professional counseling for low-income employees, cross-sectorial and international networking, and producing professional and academic knowledge about women and work.
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
