complicate things further, from my own professional perspective, I was actually uncomfortable with both the position of the ideologically committed, action-oriented researcher and that of the detached evaluator. As an anthropologist, my main intellectual motivation was to flesh out the paradoxes of social economy, to explore the mysterious ways in which the neoliberal logic managed to creep into the vision of social change activists, and to understand—without judgment—how the women at the receiving end were making their involvement in the projects meaningful in terms that typically evaded both the activists who wanted to politicize them and the professionals who aimed to discipline them.
Economic Empowerment for Women—Training Women in Microentrepreneurship
Economic Empowerment for Women (EEW) was established in Haifa in 1997 by a group of feminist activists from the Haifa Feminist Center Isha le Isha (Hebrew, “woman to woman”), and was registered as an independent organization in 2000.3 Its mission is to bring about economic change for women in Israel through a multilevel approach that includes assisting in small business development, broadening public policy, and developing need-specific programs for diverse populations, with a focus on women from the disadvantaged sectors of society. EEW’s main program, A Business of One’s Own, is a year-long empowerment and entrepreneurial training course. It runs several such courses yearly throughout Israel, in Hebrew and in Arabic. Other projects include a Business Incubator for course graduates, Savings for the Future to foster and promote asset development strategies, Creative Marketing via Technology for Arab women, and lobbying for policy change. During the first decade of its operation EEW also collaborated with the Koret Israel Economic Development Fund in a microcredit loan fund, in which partnership it is no longer active. To date it reports having served over 4,000 women and played an active role in the establishment and growth of over 1,700 small businesses among graduates and loan recipients. As I explain in detail in Chapter 1, EEW, like most civil society organizations in the field, works in close collaboration with a diverse array of agencies, including government and municipal agencies, members of the business community, and civil society groups.
In 2002 I was commissioned by the National Insurance Institute (NII), the major state agency in charge of welfare benefits, to do evaluation research of A Business of One’s Own, following NII’s entry into this project as a donor and strategic partner. As part of this study I carried out six months of participant observation in an Arabic-speaking economic empowerment course in Haifa, followed by another six months of less intense observations at the escort meetings for the graduates who opened businesses. For the three and a half years of the study, I also participated in periodic meetings of the projects’ steering committee, attended events that EEW held for its employees and volunteers, and collected relevant articles published in the local press. Throughout this period, I kept a systematic record of my observations, informal conversations, and reflections.
Besides my direct participant observations, the Microentrepreneurship Study escorted, over the course of three and a half years, fifteen groups, each averaging twenty participants. Fifty-one percent of them were Arabic speakers, the rest predominantly Hebrew speakers. Groups were located in different parts of Israel and covered a wide diversity of linguistic, religious, and ethnic backgrounds. Jewish participants included Mizrahi and Ashkenazi; secular, observant, and ultra-Orthodox women; Hebrew speakers; and recent immigrants. Palestinian participants included women living in cities, villages, and semiurbanized communities. They were mostly Muslims, but there were also Christian women and one group of Bedouins. The members of these groups answered two rounds of structured questionnaires (239 in the first round and 195 in the second), administered to them by research assistants upon their enrollment in the project and again a year later after they completed the course and the business escort period. Fifty-eight of them also gave us open-ended, face-to-face life-history interviews, of which I conducted five (in Arabic) and several research assistants conducted the rest. All the in-depth interviews were recorded and transcribed. Five of them, in Russian, were also translated into Hebrew. Lastly, I conducted four focus groups with participants and graduates of the courses, and fourteen semistructured interviews with EEW staff members and freelancers, and with some of their local partners in the Haifa-based course.
After the official completion of the study and the submission of my report to the NII (Sa’ar 2007c), I decided to expand my research to the field of social economy more generally. I was also eager to break away from the position of evaluator, with which I was very uncomfortable. I now aimed at a more open-ended exploration of the structural dynamics of the field, asking comparative and theoretical questions rather than being bound by issues of “success” and “failure,” which I had regarded all along as discursive preoccupations integral to the field. Thanks to financial support from the Israel Science Foundation (ISF) I was able to move to this more open-ended phase of the study a year after I completed the first one. In 2007 I returned to EEW to conduct a second round of participant observations in an economic empowerment course. This time it was in Hebrew, and again took place in my home town of Haifa. The funding from the ISF also allowed me to conduct research with two other organizations, al-Tufula and Mahut Center, which are described in the following sections, and to hold more interviews with professionals and functionaries in the field.
Atida—Training Palestinian Women to Be Employees
The al-Tufula (Arabic, “childhood”) center was established in Nazareth in 1989 by a group of Palestinian women citizens of Israel.4 Since its establishment the center has been working in two main fields: early childhood care and development, and women’s empowerment. Working toward a vision of society in which all members have equal opportunities to exercise their full capacities, al-Tufula’s focus on women and children in early childhood stems from the belief that these two fields are in particular need of nurturing and support. The center runs an early childhood daycare service. It sponsors the translation into Arabic of quality children’s books and the publication of original books for and about children and women. It has a library that also sells books. It runs regular programs for early childhood educators and programs for youth. It holds conferences and recreational events for women and for families with small children. It performs advocacy and networking, mostly in collaboration with other grassroots organizations. And it runs community volunteers’ projects.
In 2010 I was invited to research two of al-Tufula’s projects. One, called Atida, was an economic empowerment project conducted collaboratively by four organizations and a large philanthropic foundation, which also acted as a strategic partner. Here I was invited to be an evaluator by the representative of the donor organization. While the project did not belong to al-Tufula alone, this body managed the actual activity: the classes and workshops, the bulk of the administration, and most of the meetings of the partners. It was also the direct employer of three of the five employees hired to work in the project. By the end of a three-year pilot, the partnership of the four organizations that ran Atida dissolved and the project in its new phase became fully absorbed by al-Tufula. My involvement was during the second year.
Atida5 aimed to help integrate Palestinian-Israeli women with twelve years of schooling or above into the waged workforce in gainful jobs that matched with their skills and capacities. Its operative targets were to
introduce a working model for partnership among expert organizations
introduce a working model for working with women, based on acknowledgment of their capacities, and escort them through the training and job placement to help them keep their jobs and obtain all their rights
be an address for any Arab woman in search of a job
change the attitudes of Israeli employers to make them more open to employ Arab women.
develop and disseminate
