The Tachlit Meir Center
(The Comprehensive Center for Youth at Risk)
Last update: 31.01.2010
About 160 teens living in Sderot have been identified by Social Services as “youth at high risk.” These boys and girls have dropped out of school and are exposed to drug and alcohol abuse; some are known to the police and none are in any kind of formal educational or social framework.
The Tachlit Meir Center in Sderot has been open since 2006, offering at high risk teens a safe haven where they can rest from focusing on simple survival and, with the help of caring adults, assess their lives and begin anew. The Center is open 5 days a week, for 8 - 11 hours every day. The Center’s program offers at high risk teens a second chance at childhood, this time with the mentoring they need to form a solid base for adulthood.
Tachlit’s immediate objective is to get these teens off the streets and offer them an alternative that supports, and is supported by, normative social values. The Tachlit Meir Center’s ultimate goal is removing youth at high risk from current and future dependence on welfare services and helping them develop a network of strong life skills that will lead them to functional and social independence in normative society. To support this goal, every young man and woman who enters Tachlit receives a personal program, tailored specifically to cover all their needs. Most of the program’s participants are assigned a personal councelor who takes the role of “significant adult” for them, helping them make decisions and progress while unraveling the complications many youth at high risk already have in their lives.
Personal programs include:
- Psycho-didactic testing to identify weak points in their eduation and its effect on their emotions and thought processes.
- Vocational training, often in technological fields. For instance, Tachlit offers trains youths to be guides for the Compedia program.
- Social and leisure activities like parties, trips, extreme sports activities and participation in the city’s student council.
- Life Skills training, a set of skills that will help them cope with troubles and disapointments, live an independent and responsible life, make healthy choices and distance themselves from drug and alcohol use and abuse.
Participants are encouraged to return to school or to study externally, with an eye on acquiring their high school diploma. Some have done well enough to continue on to college. All are encouraged to serve either in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) or in National Service (actions that most refuse to consider at the time they start the Tachlit program). In Israel, these experiences are basic building blocks for feelings of value and self-confidence, and future social and employment opportunities in normative adult society that many at high risk kids miss out on.
Today, about 80 youths are enrolled in Tachlit's programs, 20 of whom were able to join Tachlit after the program moved to a new and larger building in December 2008. Most of the teens are from Sderot’s Kavkazi (from the Former Soviet Union) and Ethiopian immigrant communities. 60% of the participants have learning disabilities and some have trouble reading and writing in Hebrew.
Tachlit Meir is proud of its achievments and the achievments of its partipants: the rate of opening criminal reports involving Tachlit Meir’s teens has dropped from 70% to 30%; 14 Tachlit graduates are now serving in the IDF. The success stories of some participants are based on improved communication, abandoning violent and anti-social behavior, return to studies or developing healthy relationships. Each teen has unique needs, each follows a unique program, and each finds his or her unique success.
Within the Tachlit Meir Center, parents of teens can receive help from the Parent & Teen Center, operated by Tachlit Meir with Amutat Noar and Sderot’s Department of Social Services.
The Tachlit Meir Center is working now to open a trade school that will serve as an informal yet important educational framework for youth at high risk. The Tachlit Meir Center operates with the help and full cooperation of Sderot’s Department of Social Services and other offices that work with youth at risk.
Amdocs global management joins forces with the Tachlit Meir Center
Gvanim thanks its program partners: The Family and Friends of Meir Zenwirt; The DM Charitable Trust; The Municipality of Sderot, Departments of Education and Social Services; the National Insurance Institute; Sderot Community Center; Magbit Canada; the Shlomit Association; the Samuel Sebba Fund; The Association of Friends for Society (Amutat Haverim Lemaan HaHevra); IDB Foundation; NCJW (The National Council of Jewish Women); Sapir College, the division for social involvement; Matan – Your Way to Give
