The Heschel Center for Sustainability

National Network
Israel
Address

85 Nachalat Binyamin St.
Tel Aviv
Israel

Telephone
+972-3-5608788
Fax
+972-3-5605091
E-Mail
heschel@heschel.org.il
Mobile Phone
+972-50-7470077
Organisation Type
Non-Governmental Organization
Year of Establishment
1994
Fields of Activity
  1. Environment/Sustainable development
General Information
The Heschel Center is an Israeli non-governmental organization. It has 17 staff employees. For the year 2009,its budgeted resources are approximately $900,000. The Center receives most of its funding from a number of private foundations located in the United States and Europe. It is engaged in a great variety of environmental sustainablility education programs through its flagship Environmental Fellows Program, the Green Schools Network, and Maof Seminars. It is also involved in many concrete capacity building and training projects, particularly through the Center for Local Sustainability. The organization's main partners include a number of environmental and civil NGOs, such as Life and Environment and Shatil, the Porter School, the Ministry of Environment and the Center for Local Government.
Mission and Objectives

The Heschel Center for Environmental Learning and Leadership was established to lead Israel to become a society based on renewal of the values of justice and caring for the future of the land and its inhabitants.
We envisage a society where real progress and growth are defined in terms of ecological health and social justice, where we all participate in the making of the decisions that affect us through fair and transparent process, where values of community, common destiny and compassion are the basis for our actions.
Through its programs, the Heschel Center trains leading individuals from across the spectrum of Israeli society to become the social-environmental vanguard, implementing this innovative vision of an ecologically and socially sustainable future based on values we inherited from our forebears.

Main Projects / Activities

The Environmental Fellows Program, which is the backbone of the Center's work, is a year-long program designed to train a cadre of leaders from throughout Israeli society to be effective agents of social change. The program meets once a week throughout the year laying out the principles of sustainability and focusing on strategic thinking about systemic change.
Other main projects include: the Green School Network, which, in partnership with the Karev Educational Initiative, develops programs that support schools in Israel to heighten environmental literacy and "action competence"; the Center for Local Sustainability, which aims to advance the capacity for sustainability in Israeli local government by raising awareness and providing training, tools, and support networks for local government officials, advocates, architects, planners and mayors, to develop pilot projects in their communities; and the Media Project, intended to raise the quality and quantity of environmental reporting in Israel, through an integrated series of initiatives to engage key journalists in the sustainability agenda and issues, and through the annual awarding The Pratt Prize for Environmental Journalism in recognition of cutting-edge environmental reporting at the national, local, and community levels.

Contact (1) Full Name
Lorina Bin
Head of the organisation
Dr. Orli Ronen Rotem (Director)
Contact (2) Full Name
Dr. David Dunetz, Dr. Jeremy Benstein, Dr. Lia Ettinger