WIZO and Youth
years. A grainy video from the 90s
shows a teenage girl describing
herself pre-Kagan as someone
without much interest in school,
little self-confidence and a
corresponding lack of ambition.
Enter the Kagan Centre and Yochai
- and the girl suddenly found
herself with a video camera in her
hands. She had a tool that would
give her unparalleled vehicles
for self-expression, but which
presented her with the daunting
challenge of learning how to use
the equipment. Laughing, she
claims that she doesn’t have the
best aptitude for the work, but
at least she knows “how to push
the red button.” Grinning, Yochai
switches off the recording and
mentions that this particular girl
later went on to have a career in
media, a common story among
centre graduates.
Fast forward to today, and the video quality has improved
and the girl dresses a bit differently, but she tells roughly
the same story. Today that girl is Lama Awadi, an outspoken
and opinionated 14-year-old Arab girl who was recruited by
Yochai to join the radio programme.
Only on her 5th meeting, Lama has already entered into
the Kagan mind-set, exuding confidence and excitement
about the opportunity at hand. Along with her peers, she
participates in a weekly educational youth radio programme,
edited, prepared and produced by the students, under the
guidance of professional journalists Nadav Menuchin and
Yossef Ben Bassat.
Together, the students pool ideas they’ve gathered
throughout the week from their surroundings, usually a
mixture of pressing issues facing youth and news items, and
bring them to the studio where they edit the ideas down
into a structured radio programme. They discuss everything
from youth cigarette smoking to
compulsory army service. Nothing is
off limits, short of politics.
“Speaking on the radio gives you
confidence,” Lama explains. “But it’s
not easy: to write articles and tell
stories, you have to learn how to
express yourself in the most effective
and fitting way.”
A community
stronghold
As we walk through the maze that
is the Kagan Centre, Yochai explains
to me that in addition to fostering
media and communications among
the city’s youth, the centre also
provides badly needed community
services for the neighbourhood.
18 I SPRING/SUMMER 2014 I WIZO RE VIE W
neighbourhood demographics
changed, helping each of these
groups absorb into Israel and
shifting its services to meet the
needs of the population.
And still, as generations come and
go and the neighbourhood shifts
according to outside trends, Kagan
has stayed Kagan. Partially, this is
due to Yochai’s steady leadership,
but also to a large number of
graduates who have come back to
work at the centre and start Kagan
legacies of their own.
Lama (r) and her two radio coaches
The centre is able to function as such a vital community
stronghold partially due to its base of volunteers - a mix
of soldiers who dedicate one year of their army service to
community service, pre-army, post-high-school 18 and
19-year-olds who elect to do a gap-year of volunteer service
before enlisting, a host of local non-profits who pair up
with the centre to launch community programming, and
ordinary Israelis and visitors from abroad, grandmothers
and grandfathers, mothers and fathers, exchange students
and more, who volunteer their time for the ben Y