By Avigayil Kadesh
Many households around the world receive fresh-picked locally grown vegetables through Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) plans. The 150 CSA customers of
Kaima, just outside Jerusalem, aren’t only supporting a local organic farm. They make it possible for Kaima to provide a fresh start for teenagers who’ve dropped out of high school.
The 15- to 18-year-olds employed by this unusual social business may be depressed, living on the streets or involved in petty crime. Referred by welfare agencies in Jerusalem and surrounding towns, teens may only work at Kaima – Aramaic for “sustainability” – if they agree to get to work on their own, on time, by 7:30 in the morning Sunday to Thursday.
The Kaima logo is on all CSA boxes delivered to customers.
“The welfare authorities at first said we’d have to arrange transportation for the kids, and we said ‘No way.’ We didn’t want to give them the feeling that they’re part of a charity project,” explains Kaima founder Yoni Yefet-Reich. “We wanted them to take greater responsibility for themselves.”
Kids work one on one with Kaima staff and/or adult volunteers. Each worker typically stays a year or more, earning an hourly wage along with a daily supervised structure and a whole new world of knowledge about organic farming.
“We thought we could give them something beyond what they get in sessions with a social worker or psychologist,” Yefet-Reich says. “We were amazed to see how fast our method works.”
The transformation of Noam
“Noam” came to Kaima four months ago, just shy of 15 but already out of school for two years, Yefet-Reich relates.
“He was depressed, doing drugs, and didn’t trust adults because he had a terrible experience in school. When you work with youth it’s all about trust. And to gain their trust you have to be there with them.”
Noam began farming two days a week and quickly progressed to full time. One day a week, he works with a mentor to research and design a tool to simplify packing and weighing cherry tomatoes. He is learning marketable skills such as Excel, writing a business plan, making a prototype and presenting his project orally.
Noam has enrolled in night school, become strong physically and stopped using drugs.
“Kaima's outreach is not conventional. We just listen to them and show them a different way to live,” says Yefet-Reich. “Some of the kids do get private counseling and we offer them referrals if we think they need it. But the real treatment at Kaima happens in the field, when we are simply planting cucumbers or picking tomatoes.”
Seed money
Yefet-Reich founded Kaima in December 2012 with a group of teachers, social workers, organic farmers and other young social entrepreneurs. He had previously headed informal education at Reut, a pluralistic religious high school in Jerusalem, where one of the projects was an evening soup kitchen on school grounds. During 10 years there, he earned a master’s degree in nonprofit management from the Hebrew University.
“I am still in touch with some of the kids who volunteered in the soup kitchen, and they reminded me that I always said my dream was to create this kind of farm as a safe place for troubled youth. After meeting other people who thought similarly, we decided to take action.”
Finding land to farm in the Jerusalem area could have been problematic, but Yefet-Reich is a third-generation resident of the Beit Zayit moshav (cooperative village) just west of the city, where each family has a small plot for agriculture.
He approached members who weren’t farming their plots, and explained his idea of using employment, nature, and caring adults to turn teens’ lives around. Immediately he received permission to take over an acre’s worth and eventually gathered about three.
Harvesting the crops by hand“We started a Facebook page and posted a request for people to come and do the most stupid thing you can do: agriculture in Jerusalem,” he jokes. “You can plant trees or grapes here, but you don’t grow vegetables because the soil is too rocky.”
Nevertheless, about 70 volunteers came to Beit Zayit to clear rocks from the soil. By April, the first seeds were sown. Naomi Eisenberger, executive director of The Good People Fund in the United States, provided the seed money, literally.
“I knew Naomi from the soup kitchen and I asked her to come see what we were doing,” says Yefet-Reich. “She looked at the project and said, ‘I believe in you.’ They were the first to help us.”
Tended by hand
In June 2013, teenagers from a nearby town arrived as a test group. “We had an amazing pilot,” says Yefet-Reich. “The day after we started to publicize that we were selling CSA boxes, we had 40 customers. A week later we had 60, and now we have 150. We’re not looking for a lot more.”
Recently, Kaima opened two distribution centers -- one in Jerusalem’s German Colony and the other in the Jerusalem Botanical Gardens, which have assisted Kaima with its project.
Income from sales accounts for 38 percent of Kaima’s budget. The business model for these first few years is to cover a third of expenses from sales, a third from government agencies and a third from philanthropists, which now include foundations in Israel, the US, Luxembourg and England.
“Eventually, we want to get to 60 or 70% income from selling the crops,” he says. “We are an NGO striving for greater self-sustainability.”
The young farmers raise as many as 30 different varieties of vegetables -- such as tomatoes, zucchini, corn, lettuce, spinach, beans, basil and beets -- simultaneously, which Yefet-Reich says is both revolutionary and educational.
“You can learn so much from each plant because each needs a different kind of care,” explains Yefet-Reich.
“We want to give the youth with whom we work the power to understand that life is full of things to learn and that exercising one's curiosity and taking greater responsibility can make all the difference. We won’t push them to go back to school, but we’ll push them to find a way to be productive. Whether or not they go back to school, they all benefit.”