Coming to a City Near You!
Tomorrow's Youth Organizations is moving full speed ahead with our outreach efforts for our upcoming entrepreneurial program, Advancing Palestinian Women Entrepreneurs (APWE). APWE is our fifth entrepreneurship program that seeks to help women in Northern Palestine establish or expand their micro-businesses.TYO is excited to offer a program that will increase women's enterprise development skills and provide them with the opportunity to start or expand their micro-business. We are thrilled to recruit women to join us for psychosocial trainings, business development and coaching, branding and marketing workshops, business English and IT intensives, apprenticeship opportunities, and so much more.
TYO representatives are working with our organizational partners scouring Northern Palestine-Nablus, Jenin, Tulkarem, Tubas- and their surrounding villages interviewing women to determine our top choices for the program. Some might inquire as to why we travel to women’s cities and villages as opposed to insisting that they make the sojourn to Nablus to fill out an application. In The Importance to Outreach in Underserved Populations, Edwin J. Lopez-Soto and Ray Cebula state that “Achieving an effective and inclusive community outreach program, however, does not happen overnight. It takes time, energy and commitment to build a strong and effective outreach program.” A critical part of affective outreach to underserved populations in Palestine is an understanding that women have tremendous social and financial constraints that prohibit them from making the long journey to our center. Instead we choose to figuratively and literally meet potential entrepreneurs “where they are at” in order to respect the constraints of women in Northern Palestine while also maximizing the efficacy of our efforts.
Futton Qadri, TYO’s Outreach Coordinator, states that “Outreach is such a critical component of TYO’s work with children, youth, and women. We create a strategic plan that identifies the cities we want to travel to, identify our existing and new organizational partners who can help us access entrepreneurs, and utilize newspaper, radio, and internet resources to further publicize our outreach.”
Outreach is both challenging and one of the most gratifying components of our work with entrepreneurs. Keep a look out for us as we might be coming to a city near you!
- Vanessa, Women's Empowerment Program Coordinator