The «She Is the Origin» initiative

The Fares al-Arab Foundation for Development and Charitable Works and the Bait Byout institution in Ramallah concluded the initiative “She Is the Origin”, implemented in partnership with Pal-Think for Strategic Studies within the project “Strengthening cooperation among Palestinian local community organisations for strengthening the independent Palestinian state”, implemented by Pal-Think with the aim of unifying the efforts of civil-society institutions in the homeland's two halves to find proposals and solutions for the issues and crises facing Palestinian society.

The initiative was implemented in four stages. The first stage consisted of carrying out a number of intensive workshops addressing the concepts of gender, justice, and gender equality, and discussion of the issue of violence against women — the issue the initiative seeks to discuss and to lay down proposals for curbing.

The second stage consisted of organising intensive workshops in the Gaza Strip's governorates simultaneously over Skype with workshops carried out in the West Bank through institutions specialised in this field, addressing the topics of social roles, domestic violence, and psychological violence and its effect on the family — helping unify the discussion among the groups on both sides and bring out the principal causes of the spread of the phenomenon of violence against women in the Palestinian governorates. In coordination with the Bait Byout institution in Ramallah, dialogue sessions were held within the initiative's third stage on the effect of the issue of violence against women. A meeting was likewise held on the importance of culture and creative writing in expressing women and bringing out their causes, with the writers of the Tuqan literary salon — these meetings carried out in the historic Sabat al-Alami in old Gaza. And through the fourth stage, embodied in a dialogue meeting between the Fares al-Arab Foundation and the Bait Byout institution in Ramallah over Skype, the initiative's principal outputs were taken up, with the recommendations and proposals recorded in a research paper as one of the initiative's most important outputs, to be published in cooperation with Pal-Think.