Capacity Building for Sustainable Local Economies

The Heschel Center is developing a new project to tackle one of the most basic problems of economic development – the cycle of poverty perpetuated by the growing socio-economic gaps between center of the country, and northern and southern periphery regions.

In our view, what is needed is a program which involves citizens in planning their own economic future based on their community's inherent advantages and resources – building the capacity for sustainable economic development and encouraging local enterprise. The Capacity Building for Sustainable Local Economies project seeks to achieve this goal by creating an empowered young leadership from the disadvantaged periphery that will stimulate local economic entrepreneurship, creating economic activities that circulate money locally and enhance social and natural capital in the process of economic development.

The Heschel Center will create and execute a training programme based on successful and proven tools, processes and experience developed by the London-based new economics foundation, selecting and adapting them to fit the needs and challenges of diverse communities in Israel. The Heschel Center develops local leaders who can see how their community's economic, social, and environmental problems and solutions are interconnected and related to questions of the shape of society as a whole.

The solutions they will create, linking together social, environmental and economic issues within their own towns, will create a strategic basis for a sustainable Israeli economy. Our approach embodies the environmental slogan "Think global, act local" – the issues are treated on a local level but within a wider context of their effects and as part of a national and international network. The project will be directed by the Heschel Center's Academic Supervisor, Dr Lia Ettinger.