A community-driven support model that mobilizes Palestinian creativity.

How It Works

Rawa believes that community-led priority-setting and oversight of support resources is the right approach from a social justice perspective. It’s also smart strategy. Rawa’s model enhances and strengthens existing on-the-ground resources and networks, raising Palestinian community groups’ existing capacity to be creative and dynamic. And, with a light and nimble structure, fewer resources and energies are spent on institutional costs and development.

Rawa’s broad mandate is to support creative community development solutions (using social, economic, and/or cultural approaches) from small-to-medium sized Palestinian organizations and unregistered groups. The funding process begins and ends with community decision-makers (our four Community Clusters).

Community-Led Process

Drawing from their intimate local knowledge, community members prospect (seek out ideas and gather them as simple concept notes) and select (at an all-cluster democratic forum) innovative community initiatives. This participatory, collaborative, and democratic process fosters communication, learning, networking, solidarity, and exchange between fractured and separated Palestinian communities. After proposed community development solutions are selected for funding, local partners shepherd them throughout the support process, rather than impede them with arbitrarily imposed conditions and outcome-based documentation. 

Experimentation and Learning 

Since the most successful outcomes are sometimes unforeseen and unplanned, Rawa prioritizes learning together, remaining open to different pathways to success, and accepting that occasional failures are unavoidable, yet often illuminating. Rawa’s support model embraces flexibility, honoring the organic and creative ways communities generate and implement authentic solutions. In doing so, we pave the way for experimental ideas that carry the potential to cross disciplinary and political boundaries, but that funders might otherwise overlook or be unable to support (because they lack knowledge, scale, or capacity, or because of legal restrictions or political concerns).

New Ways to Give to Palestine

As a basket fund, Rawa is a global philanthropic resource mobilizing platform, designed to make it easier for people to donate to Palestinian communities, and for Palestinian communities to effectively and autonomously use that support. Rawa advocates for progressive Palestinian community development at the international philanthropy level, leveraging the funding power of foundations, development agencies, individual donors, fundraisers, and novel fundraising models (like crowdfunding), while ensuring equitable power dynamics between donors and local communities when it comes to the distribution and use of funds.

Seeing sustainability as shared responsibility, Rawa’s alternative support system is designed to move to the next level of participatory funding and community self-reliance—by raising diversified, rather than centralized funds, and by incentivizing local social resource mobilization.