engage decision makers and high-profile politicians, execute ambitious projects, and exert significant influence on the agenda and discourse of social responsibility, are strategic actors in the field of social economy. Eitan Shani, a social analyst I interviewed in 2013, who has been evaluating the impact of social economy projects since 2008, counted them as “infrastructure organizations,” together with about ten others. Beyond immersion in particular projects, these organizations aspire to plan and organize philanthropy and corporate responsibility better, to develop standardized measurements of social impact, promote transparency and accountability, professionalize NGOs’ financial and organizational management, and develop a language in which ideas of social sustainability can be communicated across the full spectrum of government, businesses, and civil society.
Grassroots Grounded Projects
Despite the heavy involvement of the business and government sectors, grassroots organizations have played an important part in shaping and operating the field of social economy. These are human rights, minority rights, and feminist organizations, which in the late 1990s began to shift their focus toward the domain of economic rights and launched pioneering initiatives in that direction, taking inspiration from CED initiatives in other countries. These groups sprang up from the legacy of human rights, so when they started working on the economic empowerment of women and minorities they were ill-equipped, ideologically and organizationally, to collaborate with the business, state, or municipal sectors. For example, when Economic Empowerment for Women, one of the grassroots organizations in which I did fieldwork for this research, launched its first microentrepreneurship course in 1999, its representatives were laughed out of the offices of MATI, an agency of the MITL that gives consultancy services for small businesses, to which they applied for collaboration. Less than a decade later, this same organization had become a regular partner of MATI and a prominent participant in forums on women’s economic empowerment, along with high officials in state agencies, municipal welfare bureaus, large philanthropic foundations, and BONPOs. Other social change and feminist organizations likewise continue to play an important role in the ongoing development of the field.
Hence the field of social economy produces somewhat unexpected encounters of actors with very different subject positions and identifications. A clear ideological and institutional opposition exists between people who are identified with the dominant political and economic systems and those who have made it their vocation to criticize and oppose these systems; nevertheless, individuals across the board have reason to engage each other in their quest to promote their projects. The distances between them therefore widen and narrow as they engage in overt disagreements or, conversely, as they discover social, professional, and sometimes even political affinities, or as personal careers carry individuals across from one arena to another.
As for funding, grassroots social-change organizations direct much of their fundraising efforts to private and public foundations outside the GONGOs and BONPOs, so that in at least part of their projects they may remain the sole visionaries, operators, and representatives. Characteristically, these are progressive Zionist foundations such as the New Israel Fund or particular Jewish federations, which define their mission as supporting human rights and a democratic culture, or non-Jewish international bodies that support minorities, women, workers’ unions, and the like. I mention some of these projects in Chapter 3, in a brief review of radical feminist initiatives that do not explicitly center on the economic issue. This pattern, moreover, is particularly characteristic of Palestinian organizations, which are less likely to receive support from state and related mainstream agencies. Although the target populations of such bodies now tend to include Arabs, their entitlement is limited to issues distinctly considered “apolitical,” a serious qualification as many of these Palestinian organizations have an explicitly political discourse and orientation.
However, when they operate projects in the more specific field of social economy, the vast majority of grassroots organizations work in close collaboration with larger, more mainstream bodies. Projects typically are run by clusters of partners, with one NGO usually acting as the main operator and the others varying in their degree of involvement. Thus one partner, say the local welfare bureau, may be active at the stage of recruiting participants; another (a community center or some other public institution) may provide the room in which classes and conferences actually take place, perhaps with some secretarial services included, while a third partner may pay for the lecturers and moderators. In other cases collaboration among the partners may be much closer and active, with the more mainstream partners keeping a close eye on progress through participation in steering committees, demanding detailed interim reports, or paying routine visits to the field.
The Tapestry of the Field
In the course of this study I conducted and recorded focused conversations with forty-two people, thirty-five women and seven men, who were directly involved in the field as project managers, lecturers, group moderators, impact evaluators, consultants, or representatives of foundations and ministerial agencies. I interviewed thirty-one of these people myself, and the rest through research assistants. A few of them also participated in a focus group that I held in Haifa in 2009. For the rest of this chapter I draw on these conversations to outline some of the prominent features of the field—discursive motifs, biographies, strategies, motivations, and dilemmas—as seen from the perspective of the people who operate the projects.
Overwhelming Encounters across Class and Ideological Divides
Rivka Shamir was about sixty years old when I interviewed her in 2003 in her office at the private accountancy firm where she was an associate. Two years earlier she had joined an NGO that works with low-income women as a freelance lecturer in their business training courses. Rivka opened her interview with me with a statement: “FemiBiz [pseudonym] has fulfilled a dream for many women, and also for me.” Then she continued:
For years, I’ve dreamed of teaching economics to women. I contacted a bank and offered to teach for them, and then MATI [the agency of the MITL that gives consultancy services for small businesses] but I didn’t get any response. Why do I want to teach women? Because a woman cannot be independent who depends on her husband’s purse strings …
Then one day I was invited to give a talk at the women’s club at this regional council [names the council] and I titled it “What do economics and feminism have in common?” In my ignorance I knew nothing about feminist activity here in the north and I drove all the way to the Women’s Lobby in Jerusalem to collect material. Anyway, after my talk the organizer talked about me to someone from FemiBiz, who had also given a talk there, and they called me to ask if I’d work with them. I was so happy that I shouted “I want to!” … The beginning was very exciting. In the first few meetings of the course that I taught I was so nervous. I expected the women to say that the material was too difficult. But no, they said it was very interesting and that I was being very respectful. Now, I’ve taken many courses in my life and attended many lectures, I never paid any thought to whether the lecturer was being respectful. Respect didn’t come into it because I simply took it for granted … Then I got similar reactions also in the second course [taught in a different city] … Women said that not all the lecturers had treated them with respect.
Later in the interview Rivka talked about the learning difficulties of women who attend the classes when they are preoccupied with pressing problems at home:
Disempowered women do not just suffer from low energy. The opposite is also true. They can be very stormy. Any slight comment that someone makes might start a fire. Sometimes this made teaching really difficult. I think it is possible that other lecturers, whom the women experienced as disrespectful, were not necessarily offensive. They were simply reacting to the personal disquiet of some of the participants … [And later], Their distress was so overwhelming that it was very difficult for me to listen to them. So I actually didn’t tell them that I was also a volunteer at the hotline for battered women. I didn’t want to encourage them to share with me more than I was prepared to take in.
