Imagine a sustainable future for Israel. [4] At the Heschel Center we dare to imagine - but we don't stop there. We imagine how this vision becomes real and we bring together the people who are working to make it so. We are imagining the future - one based on the best of the past and the potential of the present - and we invite you to join us in creating it. [5]

 Help us help Israel achieve sustainability

Join the Heschel Center's Decade of Success Campaign [6]

Dear Friends,

For the first time, we at the Heschel Center are making a direct general appeal to you, our friends and supporters, to further assist us in our work to create a sustainable future for Israel, based on ecological health and social justice.

This is a remarkable and probably pivotal moment in our efforts to create a sustainable future for Israel - on the one hand, there appears to be a window of opportunity to create substantive change, on the other hand the social-environmental threats and challenges have never appeared so critical. The obvious fear is that if this window closes before we rise to the moment and make significant advances, the current threats will become irreversible, cause significant, long-term harm and create an unliveable society for our children.

As we embark on our tenth year of activity (!!!), we ourselves are often astounded by the breadth and depth of our projects and the ever-widening ripples of change they stimulate: mayors deciding to turn their towns and cities into models of sustainability; a group of school children (one example from over 150 schools) leading the municipality to divert coastal development and instead declare a nature reserve which the children themselves help run; an initiative to strengthen sustainable local economies in remote and under-privileged areas; prime-time news reports on global warming and other environmental threats by Environmental Fellows graduates on each of the commercial television networks; another Fellow leaving his academic post to head the Health Ministry's Department of Public Health - and dozens of other initiatives ranging from practical ecology models (such as town-wide composting, or energy efficiency tools) and community development, through to political activity (co-chair of the Knesset environmental caucus, members and candidates for local councils).

This growth in the Heschel Center's activity and scope (we now have over twenty employees!), creates an ever-increasing burden on our thin infrastructure, at the same time as it builds more and more projects with concrete results. To meet the challenge of the current moment, we need to harness together all the energy and initiatives we have created into a joint, cooperative network of change for Israeli society. To do this, we naturally need to strengthen the base and this is why we are now appealing for your help. To mark our tenth year of successful activity we aim to create a process bringing together the hundreds of agents of change stimulated by the Heschel Center over the last decade, climaxing in a day-long event in December 2008. The most appropriate celebration we could think of for our ten-year anniversary is an event which produces active working groups of cooperation for social-environmental change. We need you to help make this happen.

Please donate what you can to our Decade of Success appeal. US tax-free credit-card donations can be made directly over the internet here [7], and cheques can be sent either to American Friends of the Heschel Center (US tax-free) or directly to the Heschel Center in Israel - as described here [8].

We consider your support a partnership and welcome any feedback and input. You can contact me directly via email: eilon@heschel.org.il [9] or by telephone at the office: +972-3-5608788.

To this end we of course also invite you to participate in and/or invite other to join our exciting new event, the Heschel Hazon Hike Bishvil Yisrael [10] . We are also organizing a study tour to Israel for Heschel supporters (following the success of the first one, which you can read about here [11]), October 26-30, 2008 - there are limited places so please reply as soon as possible if you are interested in joining.

Finally, I want to thank you for your continuing support of our endeavours. There is no under-estimating the importance of this support in creating the Heschel Center's ten years of success in building a sustainable future for Israeli society.

With respect and appreciation, 

Dr Eilon Schwartz 
Director.