Encouraging our fellows

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Nitzan NPO – Therapeutic Farm for Youth at Risk

Israel

Photo of the Project

Vision

Reaching excluded and weakened populations and bolstering them through therapeutic processes aiming to help them persevere in their educational frameworks.

Decreasing dropout rates at out-of-home educational frameworks to those of the general population.

Activity

Yonatan and his army comrades experienced events in which they lost close friends. These events left their mark on them, and led Yonatan to become socially active and commemorate his fallen comrades, Yuval Dagan and Or Assaraf, through a living memorial, the therapeutic farm.

The friends Yonatan lost and his work with youth led to the establishing of the therapeutic farm. In Israel the dropout rates are extremely high (double-digits) among youth at risk in out-of-home frameworks as compared to the rates in the general population.

The farm is based on the approach that it is possible to prevent youth undergoing a crisis from dropping out given appropriate therapeutic support to help them out of their crisis.

The therapeutic farm was established to provide just such support. The farm offers therapeutic tools based on the farm sphere – agriculture, ecologic construction (mud and wood), horses, dogs, etc.; and the desert sphere – brief excursions into the desert, ancient skills such as tracking, carving, fire, and therapeutic hikes.

The therapeutic processes offered at the farm can help youth in crisis break out of the crisis cycle and return to their frameworks to continue their educational processes instead of dropping out.

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