(Photo: Dualis Social Investment Fund)
By Abigail Klein Leichman - January 2, 2017
Originally appeared here in Israel21c
With a sparkle in her eye, a traditionally garbed Arab-Israeli mother asked to speak at a recent employee meeting of Cooking Coexistence (“Tavshil Hevrati” in Hebrew), a social business in northern Israel where she’d started her very first job outside the home some six weeks previously.
“We have five children and my husband earns 5,000 shekels [$1,300] a month. My salary from Cooking Coexistence now enables me to buy new clothes for my children and to pay for sending them to afterschool activities,” the woman said, as other women in the group nodded in agreement.
“I had tears in my eyes; it was a very emotional moment,” recalls Allan Chanoch Barkat, founder and chairman of the Dualis Social Investment Fund, which sponsors Cooking Coexistence and other social businesses in Israel.
Cooking Coexistence is an institutional catering business that trains and employs Arab and Jewish women over the age of 35 whom government agencies have identified as chronically underemployed or unemployed. Read More