What questions should we ask?
Many organizations were active in the 90s during the euphoria of the Oslo agreements, but not many survived the challenges of the Second Intifada and the following years. The fact that Windows began its work during the first Intifada and is still alive and kicking, cannot be taken for granted. This fact pushed us, already several years ago, in two directions. One was to share the stories of Windows and its people - the team members and volunteers, participants and their families, supporters, and others that over the years became part of Windows’ community. What motivated people to join Windows? Or to leave? What impact did being part of Windows had on their lives and choices? What were the challenges they faced? The other direction was to share the lessons that we learned throughout 30 years of work - what are the right approaches? The best methods and tools? What should not be done if we wish to create a positive sustainable change? While we are moving on with the evaluation process that will answer these questions, we will be able to collect the stories of Windows’ community and pack them into some kind of a “book” that will explain both the strength of Windows and its persistence as well as the development of our theory of change, a body of knowledge others in our field can learn from.

What defines success?
Determining how to evaluate success can be difficult given the nature of our programs. While we will try to assess the achievements of our programs in the evaluation project, another way to see success is by the wish of a one-time donor to keep working with us. The Komitee für Frieden, Grundrechte und Demokratie was very happy with the Windows’ programs they funded in 2018-19 and they recently offered us a few years of partnership. Now, we are able to look further into the future, with the confidence that our youth program will be funded, giving us the time and energy needed to fundraise for other projects. Thus, we have developed a four-year plan that begins with the evaluation of our many years’ work with youth and a plan to update the youth program, aiming to start again with our youth programs in the 2022-3 activity year, after proper team training.

Until then, we will put a lot of effort into evaluating our work with youth since 1994. In this process of evaluation, we combine the work of Windows’ long-time team members and interns that offer us their academic knowledge.

From teaching Journalism to a conflict resolution program
We began our work with youth by teaching them journalism. The methods of creating change evolved gradually as we needed to offer our young journalists the tools to deal with the challenges of learning about each others’ reality and facing information that often contradicted what they thought they knew before. Over the years, we explored, mostly based on intuition and common sense, various tools and methods and added to our program the things that worked best. With the ever-changing reality, we kept developing our tools to fit the growing needs of society. Gradually, the Hebrew-Arabic magazine became a tool in a conflict resolution process, something we didn’t think of when the organization was established. With time, we began to conceptualize our methods and tools into a comprehensive Theory of Change. Now, through the evaluation, we wish to retrace our steps in order to better understand how this theory evolved and how we can make it even clearer in order to improve our programs.

What made us decide to share our knowledge?
Independent of Windows, academic research that was done on people-to-people programs, 10-15 years ago, showed that our approach as an organization and the methods we intuitively chose to use with our youth are indeed the most effective ones. This encouraged us to share our knowledge with other educators and the general public. We felt that our 30-years experience is unique, because of the structure of Windows as a triangle organization with Palestinians from both sides of the Green Line and Israeli Jews; because of the length of our youth programs that last between 1-5 years with an option to continue when the participants are in their 20s; because of our ability to touch each and every topic as hard as it may be; and because of the motivation for activism that became a central part of our work. While the impact of our work is limited due to the small number of participants in our long-term programs, we believe that sharing our experience with others may lead to a bigger impact.