In April 2025, the Galilee Foundation’s Scholarship implementing partner the Arab Culture Association held a series of workshops as part of their Volunteering Programme. In a first of its kind, a week’s worth of workshops and focus groups were held for our scholars in Ramallah, with a total of 30 students attending.
The workshops were for students participating in three of the ACA’s Volunteering Programmes or “pillars”, namely the Intellectual Programme, the Leadership Programme, and the Art Programme.
For many of the students, this was their first time visiting the West Bank. They had the chance to hear perspectives they have never heard before, meet Palestinians from the West Bank, and bond with one another.
Each Volunteering Programme had a separate set of lectures and trips, including, for participants in the Art Programme, to The Palestinian Museum, The Qattan Exhibition, and the NAWA Foundation (for a lecture on the history of Palestinian classical music pre-1948). The Intellectual School focused on creative and political writing workshops in order to work towards the publication of a magazine later in the summer. Participants in the Leadership School received workshops on facilitation, public speaking and other key skills. There were lectures by Mustafa Barghouti, Sami Abou Shehadeh, Yanal Nabali, Mohammed Farhat, ACA staff members, and others.
Separately, the ACA also held several other workshops for the Volunteering Programme’s Land Sovereignty and Art programmes. These included a journey through the Carmel Mountains, held as part of the Land Sovereignty programme, and a workshop with Anton Shalhat, exploring the systematic dismantling of the Palestinian city and ongoing efforts to ruralize its remaining structures and identity.
The workshops represented, in the words of our Scholarship Coordinators, “an amazing opportunity to build a community on a whole new level”, saying “they all feel a lot closer now”. Following on from these few days, the students have proactively decided to initiate a group called “The Association is Our House” – a chance to come to the ACA to study with one other. This, they say, is “the sense of community they always aspire towards”.
