Background: Statusless Community in Israel
Over the recent decades, Israel has experienced an influx of migrant workers, refugees, and asylum seekers who fled from various countries in Africa and Asia in search of financial and physical security. Although born in Israel, their children are undocumented and live on the outskirts of Israeli society; they lack identification numbers and are deprived of basic rights such as healthcare and welfare services. Without legal status in Israel, they can't access governmentally subsidized childcare, and often end up in makeshift daycares, known as "children warehouses". These centers have neither the necessary personnel nor the resources to properly care for them, resulting in their further isolation and a deepening of the gap between them and their Israeli peers.
Today, there are over 8,200 status-less children in Israel, with 4,400 children under the age of 6 living in Tel Aviv
alone.
About Unitaf
Unitaf was created by The Fund for Social Involvement in 2004 to ensure that all children, regardless of civil status, have a safe and healthy childhood.The Unitaf Model is an educational, therapeutic, and organizational approach recognized by the Prime Minister’s Office and the Ministries of Welfare and Economics as a standard model for operating frameworks in the foreign community.
Today, Unitaf operates 44 programs and serves over 1,200 children ages 3 months - 6 years from the foreign community. Our programs are owned and operated by foreign caregivers and teachers under careful guidance by licensed educational professionals. Unitaf children receive safe and proper childcare, 3 meals a day, skilled therapeutic staff, social support and assistance for families in crisis, and educational-therapeutic work designed to help children and their families.
Bridging Social and Economic Gaps
Beyond our high-standard childcare, Unitaf emphasizes bridging the eco-social gaps between status-less children and their Israeli peers. To accomplish this, we employ a holistic strategy that seeks change on three levels - individual children, Unitaf families, and the wider community.
At the first level, we run programs such as Story-Time, a research-based group intervention aimed at improving the children's Hebrew and bringing them to equal grounds by the time they enter the mandatory educational system. Additionally, we tailor individual programs for developmentally struggling children, each to their unique needs.
At the second level, acknowledging the generational consequences of the refugee positionality, our focus is on the parents. Our Therapeutic Center offers additional social services to families in need, with a special focus on intergenerational trauma. Unitaf provides a variety of workshops for parents, and scholarships for struggling families, as well as support in handling the complexity of Israeli Bureaucracy.
At the third level, we take a community approach. As our programs are operated by refugee women, we provide both training and employment opportunities. Beyond those, We cooperate with other refugee organizations, such as Mesila, and Physicians for Human Rights, in legal and political struggles against discriminatory policies -such as the recent change to the health insurance law, that significantly worsens the situation for status-less communities, drives up insurance costs, and discriminates between various groups of status-less people in Israel.