Arab Educational Institute

Name of the organization or artist

Email

info@aeicenter.org

Address

P.O.Box 681, Bethlehem

Country

West Bank /Palestine

Website URL

http://www.aeicenter.org

Missions and objectives

Mission: AEI supports the sumud of Palestinian youth, women and educators by building community and creating advocacy platforms in which people’s human rights and cultural identity are voiced. The organization’s work is rooted in the values of peace, justice, sumud or perseverance, nonviolence, and inter-cultural and inter-religious respect.

Vision: Palestinians actively and publicly participating in a free, democratic, and pluralistic Palestine in which civic rights including women’s rights and the rights of religious communities are respected.

Objectives, with as target groups Palestinian women, youth and educators in the West Bank:

1. Developing leadership and life skills
2. Developing communicative competences
3. Developing skills in creative media use and other narrative-visual genres
4. Promoting inter-religious and inter-cultural living together
5. Gaining knowledge about Palestine, Palestinian sites and Palestinian popular arts
6. Educating about the Palestinian cultural identity, youth rights, women’s rights, human security, and national and cultural rights
7. Advocating to local and international audiences for the Palestinian cultural identity, youth rights, women’s rights, human security, and national and cultural rights
8. Developing and applying student-centered methodologies of learning
9. Capacity building by developing human and financial resources and raising publicity to AEI’s work
10. Developing a suitable monitoring and evaluation system.

Main Activities

It is the local coordinator of a project that facilitates advocacy actions in 20 local communities by 600 school youth and young women/mothers. In another ongoing advocacy project AEI cooperates with officials at the PNA Ministry of Education in 8 government schools around Bethlehem to increase youth capacity to constructively deal with conflict.
Recently it has been engaged in the development of an early warning and response system in Hebron H2 funded by UN Women. This system differs from the one proposed in the present project as it is directed at the prevention of conflicts. Given the present accumulation of crises AEI plans to further develop such systems for different purposes and in different contexts in the West Bank.
AEI’s oldest project, “Citizenship and Diversity: Christian-Moslem Living Together,” has run since over 20 years at private and government schools in different regions of the West Bank. It promotes values of citizenship among annually some 800-1000 teenager youth of different religious background.

Contact person

Toine van Teeffelen