Damascus-Sana
A community-based civil initiative aimed at creating a model based on building solidarity in a street, neighborhood or region by discovering the local resources in it and investing in its community capital, which is the essence of the project launched by the Civil Society Foundation in the governorates of Damascus, Raqqa and Tartous.
The initiative's goals also include forming teams to cooperate with actors in the regions and build trust with their local boards of directors from a neighborhood committee, mukhtar, municipality or community.
The initiative, in which three teams from the selected governorates participated, included segments of the local community of both sexes, as the Babila volunteer team in Rural Damascus included 250 beneficiaries, and the Tartous team about 275, and only the Qameh Foundation team in Raqqa governorate participated in which 20 beneficiaries were all women.
From the Al-Raqqa initiative, Abboud Al-Hussein, the Foundation's coordinator, talked about its activities, which included conducting dialogue training workshops, simple pilot projects and life skills for a period of 6 days, where a space was prepared for home cultivation and equipment and seeds were purchased for the cultivation process.
One of the results of this initiative, according to Al-Hussein, was the achievement of community participation and social integration among the beneficiaries, and the division of labor by electing a board of directors from them and planting one and a half dunams of household vegetables.
Among the positive results of the Raqqa initiative is the agreement with the beneficiaries to increase the cultivated area, as an additional half dunum has been prepared and cultivated.
And from the Damascus Countryside Initiative, its coordinator in Babila, Muhammad Firas Al-Rifai, indicated that its main focus is to establish a football championship that lasted 20 days, which brought together 8 teams from the towns of “Babila, Yalda, Beit Saham, Aqraba, Mrs. Zainab, Sidi Miqdad and Al-Qazaz” amid the presence of the people for encouragement. Half an hour I discussed common issues that the townspeople suffer from.
Al-Rifai explained this initiative to restore a part of communication between community members from different towns, where discussions and conversations were exchanged to build trust with the local community and attract young people, as well as a maintenance process for the playground.
This initiative also recorded other positive results, represented in the cooperation shown by the municipality of Babila as a contributing partner in the work and in the initiative of one of the players participating in the implementation of repair work in a girls' school in Sidi Miqdad.
As for the Tartous initiative, according to its coordinator Ahmed Ahmed, it included the implementation of an interactive classroom activity for children between 6 and 12 years old for about 275 male and female students, with the aim of educating them to follow the rules of personal hygiene, maintain school facilities, keep the neighborhood and city clean, implement comprehensive maintenance work for Martyr Aql Abu Abbad School and draw wall panels that dealt with awareness. On public hygiene, noting the participation of the private sector in this initiative.
Among the positive results of the Tartous initiative is that a young man with a hearing disability volunteered to paint, and a group of participating children cleaned the corridors and the school yard, and the families of the volunteer students volunteered to rehabilitate another school in Tartous, and a group of doctors provided awareness sessions about the Corona virus.
In a statement by Sana, the Chairman of the Board of Directors of Lama Khadour Spaces stated that the Foundation seeks to develop the target communities through the work of people and partnering with each other to bring about the required societal change, with a focus on the target groups and their characteristics, standing at their needs and problems, and finding work mechanisms to solve them.
Among the factors that contributed to the success of the initiatives according to the presence of the link between the objectives of the initiative to the reality of the regions and the needs of the beneficiaries, Hamas and the commitment of team leaders and volunteers despite the presence of several challenges, including the inability of some of these leaders to build and institutionalize their team that required advanced training to build the capabilities of their teams and the lack of a suitable space to implement the activities. Some spaces available in cultural centers and parks, in addition to factors related to the lack of electricity in some areas, weather conditions and the lack of documentation of activities by some of the beneficiaries.
Rasha Mahfoud