UPA is launching a summer campaign for Gaza to rebuild children’s lives!

We are going beyond the short-term relief and reconstruction of the past two months to forging pathways for long-term renewal.

The human cost of war is real and in Gaza it is repeated. Every 13-year-old child in Gaza has already lived through four wars in their short lifetime. Considering that children in Gaza constitute half of the population that lives in one of the most densely populated areas of the world, the risk of being exposed to danger and trauma is huge.

In the recent escalation during May 2021, 260 Palestinians including 66 children, lost their lives while hundreds were wounded and many more are suffering from the effects of untreated trauma.

The good news is that when we strengthen and equip families, teachers, and community resources, children will heal and can even thrive.

Therefore, with the same sense of urgency as our emergency response, we plan to partner with you to raise $70,000 in 4 weeks to expand mental health care, improve kindergartens, libraries, and medical clinics – all for the children of Gaza.

During The Ongoing Nakba Emergency Response, you helped UPA:

• Provide supplies to Makassed Hospital in Jerusalem to offer medical care without charge.
• Lead a trauma informed summer camp for 400 children in southern Gaza.
• Offer psychological first aid & phone crisis counseling by UPA mental health practitioners.
• Produce psychoeducational materials on war trauma in children, PTSD symptoms & treatment.
• Purchase a fully equipped mobile medical clinic for the Red Crescent Society in Gaza.
• Distribute food vouchers to displaced families in Gaza.
• Provide essential medical supplies to 2 hospitals & 18 filed clinics in Gaza.

Inspired by your solidary and the enormous need, UPA’s Summer Campaign will offer:

• Extended psychosocial services to reach even more caregivers by expanding telephone hotline services, group & individual in-person counseling sessions tailored to recovery from war induced trauma, the COVID-19 crisis, domestic stressors, and gender-based violence.
• Training of humanitarian organizations in Gaza to recognize trauma symptoms in their clients and providing stress management tools to case managers, thereby caring for the caregivers who themselves have experienced trauma.
• Solar panels for three kindergartens to ensure education, regardless of electricity supply.
• Repair of two Palestine Red Crescent Society -Gaza medical clinics that were damaged by the May air strikes and replace broken equipment to restore services of thousands.
• Critical medicines to Al Awda Hospital and the Union of Health Workers Committees to complement an earlier emergency grant for medical supplies.
• Repair to fishing boats in all five coastal areas, further bolstering employment, safety, and nutrition.

We can only achieve these critically needed interventions with your support, because only together we will rise!

You can support the campaign with a donation online, here.

Be certain to sign up to our email list to receive campaign updates and photos from an exceptional summer camp that the UPA mental health team in Gaza just led in partnership with the International Board on Books for Young People (IBBY) – Palestine. It combined literacy, psychosocial support, the arts, creative play, and nutrition!