Everyone has a Chance to Lend a Hand

Alin Beit Noam

Alin Beit Noam is Israel’s leading non-profit organization providing people-centered services to adults with severe mental and physical disabilities. Alin Beit Noam believes that physical limitations only become disabilities when society fails to accommodate them and works to create social change and a more welcoming, rich, and integrated society for all.

Operation Swards of Iron, October 2023

Alin Beit Noam operates a network of 5 communal apartments, housing 25 individuals living with both severe physical and mental disabilities, many of whom require assistive communicative technologies and have additional health needs. These apartments allow their residents a degree of independent living. Each apartment of 5 is supported by 3 members of staff at all times. On regular days, the residents attend a daycare center from 07:30-15:30, which serves them as a social and occupational framework. From 15:30 they return to their apartments.

The current crisis has led to the closure of the daycare center. As a result, residents have had to remain in their apartments 24 hours a day. Alin Beit Noam has had to recruit an additional 15 staff members for each morning shift, to support residents from 07:30-15:30, when they would normally have been at the daycare center.

• Sunday-Thursday between 07:30-15:30 a total of 8 hours each a day.

• On Friday between 07:30 and 12:30 for a total of 5 hours each.

Calculated weekly, this is 45 hours per employee, a total of 675 hours for 15 employees in 5 apartments throughout the week. During the other shifts and on weekends, the apartments work in their usual format with the help of the existing staff.

Alin Beit Noam has also been asked to accommodate an additional resident, Yariv, who lives in Kibbutz Yad Mordechai near the Gaza Strip. On ordinary days, Yariv travels every morning to a daycare center and returns to his home at the end of the day. In light of the incessant shelling and the infiltration of terrorists into the area, Yariv cannot stay in the kibbutz. Alin Beit Noam has therefore had to find emergency accommodation for him in Kiryat Ono. Since there is no room for him in the existing apartments, Yariv has been housed in a different apartment, with a dedicated staff member.

These additional staffing needs have placed a significant financial burden on Alin Beit Noam, for which it was not prepared, and without any ability to estimate the length of time for which this additional funding will be required. At the same time, Alin Beit Noam has lost income generated by its daycare center, hydrotherapy pool and shop.

• Cost of additional personnel per week: NIS 35,160

• Cost of additional personnel per month: NIS 152,245

• Cost of a companion for Yariv from Kibbutz Yad Mordechai per month: NIS 25,317

The organization is not receiving any government funding to cover these additional costs.

Alin Beit Noam desperately needs an additional NIS 177,562 (approximately $45,000 USD) for each month of the current state of emergency.

Your help would be deeply appreciated.