Abstract

Palestinians living in Israel suffer from significant health inequalities as compared to other Israeli citizens. This chapter summarizes the attempt of one Palestinian feminist community-based organization, Kayan, to address healthcare challenges impacting Palestinian women living in Israel. They did this at the grassroots level by identifying and empowering local female leaders. The local interventions achieved significant outcomes, new Palestinian female leadership emerged, health knowledge increased, and health behaviors improved. However, funding challenges for these interventions remain and there remain significant barriers to improving the health of Palestinian women in Israel. In this initiative, Kayan identified groups of women in five communities and provided leadership training. In turn, the local women engaged with their community on healthcare challenges that were chosen as a result of local grassroots-women led needs assessments and mappings. For an assessment of impact, this study utilized focus groups with the women, interviews with local community leaders, specification of outcomes at the local level, and questionnaires fielded to participants in the interventions. Kayan discovered that there was an increase in knowledge and changes in behavior on a variety of health-related topics. Severe health inequalities impacting marginalized people can be impacted from a bottom-up approach.

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