The initial impression obtained from Elad Blumenthal is confusing.
The look in his eyes is shy, his gait hesitant.
But the fragility he transmits evaporates as soon as he opens his mouth.
Then the power and initiative in man is revealed.
He is 34 years old, and has already managed to challenge the traditional patterns of volunteering and founded the "OneDay" organization, whose circle of volunteers includes 40,000 people.
It all started when he was a bachelor's student in health systems management at Ben-Gurion University in Be'er Sheva.
"I was looking for a place to volunteer, but everywhere I came across the same obstacle: they asked me to commit in advance to a few hours a week and for a period of a year. I did not find my place. "
One holiday he heard about an organization that needed one-time help packing food.
He organized some classmates, who went out to volunteer together.
"Slowly something interesting happened - each friend brought another friend with him, and from a group of 20 guys we reached 1,000 people at the end of the year. We realized that something interesting had been created here that was worth developing."
In November 2016, the group of members founded the "OneDay" organization, whose vision is to offer one-time volunteering without commitment.
In the following years, Elad continued to volunteer for the association, along with studying for a master's degree in business administration at the Hebrew University.
He later ran a nursing home in Ramat Gan for several years.
He inherited his love of healthcare systems from his father, Moshe, who worked in the field.
His mother, Rachel, was involved in marketing.
In the army he served as an air control officer in the Air Force. There he also instructed and commanded, and for the first time discovered his ability to stand in front of an audience and pack the shyness aside.
• • •
Raanana, the city where he grew up and where he is "in love to this day," said goodbye to Rishon Lezion, to live near his parents' parents, Shani (35), who works at the Bank of Israel.
It happened after their eldest son, two-and-a-half-year-old Itamar, was born, and they are soon looking forward to expanding the family.
After the activity grew, Elad realized that the association needed a full-time director.
He left the satisfying and rewarding work in the nursing home, in favor of a more modest salary and the instability of an evolving association.
“The venture born from the belly showed real potential to change the perception of volunteering - so I decided to rush into it,” he explains.
According to him, various studies show that compared to other countries, young Israelis rarely volunteer.
"60 percent of respondents excuse the difficulty of volunteering for lack of time. The second reason is fear of commitment, and the third major difficulty is that people do not know where to volunteer.
"The first reason is not justified in my eyes. The average young person in Israel spends eight hours a day on a smartphone. So it is not true to say 'I do not have time to volunteer'. It is more correct to say 'there are other things I prefer to do with my time.' It is indeed something that characterizes Generation Z. I see today, in the resumes that people send to the organization, that most young people go through work every two or three years.
"I will say in a way that is not politically correct, because you have to choose whether to be right or wise. The right thing to do is to tell young people 'you have to volunteer and commit, because it's important.'
"Our innovation is not to try to educate or change the volunteers, but the traditional volunteering model. The new volunteering, which today is already a concept that is talked about in research, does not replace traditional volunteering, but as a supplement. "The regular comes twice a week to educate a child or an elderly person. But there are many areas of volunteering that were once said 'I need a regular volunteer', and today they understand that it is possible to do otherwise."
The association has five branches: in Haifa, Beer Sheva, Jerusalem, Sharon and the South.
Each year it organizes about 250 different and varied volunteer activities that are open to the general public, and the goal is to reach the young people aged 18-35, those who volunteer less.
Once a month, the various activities are published on social networks and registration opens.
An average event requires about 30 volunteers.
Most registrations close in no time, and people are put on the waiting list.
"Sometimes there are also 70 people on the waiting list. On the one hand it's happy, on the other hand it pinches me. People want to volunteer, and I can't give them an answer.
"It's not easy to live in a constant sense that more can be done and more needs to be done. If at the beginning we had events where instead of 20 people four arrived, and there was embarrassment of the kind of 'her father's summer' - today it is the other way around. ".
The association strives to diversify the various activities so that everyone can volunteer in the field that suits them.
Food packaging, renovation of nursing homes, renovation of buildings for individual soldiers, construction of educational yards, along with accompanying disabled children and activities with the elderly.
• • •
"'OneDay' does not ask for a commitment in advance, but I trust that if the experience is good enough, the volunteer will want to again. For that he should feel he did something meaningful and had fun. The volunteering experience should be good. I want to be an association that looks at the volunteer not Less than she looks at the beneficiaries of volunteering. "
For this reason, for example, the activity offered by the association to the general public takes place in the evening or on Fridays, times that do not usually conflict with the working hours.
For Elad, the ambition is for volunteers to come from all sectors, with the aim of breaking stigmas and creating a connection between people who do not meet routinely.
"If the ultra-Orthodox Noam, the secular Elad and the Arab Yusuf come together to renovate a house in Be'er Sheva, an informal conversation will develop between them as people who volunteer shoulder to shoulder. The ice will break then, and we will learn to know what connects us and does not separate."
Today, the association's offices are located in the offices of the organization "Inside" in Lod, but Elad is hardly there because most of the days he is in the field, accompanying the activity itself.
And in the field, at a construction site in Raanana, we also meet him.
• • •
What about a construction site and volunteering?
In 2018, quite by chance, the association developed another channel of volunteering and originally harnessed business companies for social action.
"One of our volunteers told the Human Resources Coordinator in his work about the volunteering he did with us. She contacted us and asked us to organize a fun day for the employees. We decided to go for it."
The idea wandered between different companies, which adopted the model, and today many business companies turn to the association and donate not only the volunteer hours of their employees, but also fund the volunteer activity itself.
We are joining such an activity at an extensive construction site in the foothills of Raanana, where Tidhar employees are employed.
With work overalls and helmets, construction managers and engineers leave the scaffolding to a shed in front of the offices.
Elad harnesses them in a short conversation for the activity, and they roll up their sleeves and start packing school supplies for children they don’t have.
The bags with the Tidhar logo were purchased by "OneDay" with funding from Tidhar itself, as well as the paints, scissors, water bottles and a variety of other invested and pampering equipment.
Along with activities with companies, Taglit delegations also volunteer through the association.
"Young people from abroad want to experience Israel in their own hands.
They are our ambassadors, and the association's dream is to become an international network and open branches in Jewish communities around the world.
"In the meantime, we are investing our efforts in Israel, to ensure that two million young Israeli men and women volunteer in a flexible and enjoyable way, and that every company that wants to hold a formation day for its employees chooses a volunteer day with added value.
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