In times of crisis and challenges, like the one we our facing worldwide today, our different circles in which we live are put to a test. Many people around the world are focusing these days inward to their families and their own survival which is very well understood. However, we believe that under the right circumstances communities can play a crucial role in people’s life and help them struggle through these hard times and come out in a much better way.
Lev Echad (One Heart) is an active and living example to our different communities’ opportunities to play in these times. Lev Echad is a community crisis aid and a nationwide voluntary organization founded in 2005 by the Ein Prat Leadership Academy to create an infrastructure that would enable volunteers to operate in a professional and organized manner in a state of emergency. The organization persistently works to strengthen ties between the authorities and the volunteers, who can function as coordinators during emergency, and to create local preparedness teams.
When there are no crisis, Lev Echad is a skeleton organization with just a few members. However, when a crisis erupts, a crisis such as a war, the shooting of missiles onto Israeli communities whether in the North or the South, whether a storm or floods in any region in the country – this is when Lev Echad awakens and gathers its more than four thousand registered volunteers to go out into the field and do get the job done. With a very limited budget but a very big heart, these youth, many of them graduates of the Ein Prat Leadership Academy in Kfar Adumim, Nofei Prat and Sufa, will do whatever is necessary at that point of time.
Following the recent outbreak of the coronavirus, Lev Echad took initiative and opened a nationwide operation center in Kfar Adumim at the Ein Prat academy for leadership facility.
The headquarters in Kfar Adumim is open 24/7 with motivated young volunteers, eager and ready to answer all requests. We get a variety of requests from those in need. Our volunteers purchase the groceries for those in isolation, bring elderly people their medicine and are ready to do anything that will get the basic necessities to those who have been affected by the crisis.
As the situation continues, we are focused on starting similar headquarters in every city enabling the local community to play the biggest role in helping one another and insuring one to another that the community is there for everyone’s needs.
This open code methodology is bringing out the best in our country and generation, whole organization are stopping everything, leaving their ego behind and working together as Lev Echad to create strong social resilience in each and every community.
Each day we received hundreds of calls and these tasks are distributed to the volunteers who go out and deliver what is needed.
Since group gatherings are no longer permitted and all educational institutes have been dispersed, including pre-military programs such as the Ein Prat Academy, the students at Ein Prat joined forces with Lev Echad and the students became the volunteers who run the headquarters and put the whole operation together. A team of “talpionim” (from the IDF Talpiot unit) heard that Lev Echad needed an application that keeps track of volunteers and their requests and so they developed an application within 48 hours and produced an amazing application that helped us tremendously to keep control of all that is going on.
This unique application gives us a true and live picture of what is needed. For example – yesterday we had 164 calls and 159 tasks were completed. 42% of these calls were for grocery shopping, 8.3% were for need of transportation, 10.6% for house assistance, 10.5% for assistance needed to help care for children, 5.1% for medication and miscellaneous errands.
All these are small examples of how building a wide network of people into a community could benefit everyone – and this message is spreading. Recently, similar situation rooms were started in New York, Miami and Los Angeles with the guidance of the staff of Lev Echad guidance.
As we work to empower specific communities Lev Echad is creating one large organization aiming to contribute and create a unified society – a community where anyone can help in their own way – we are all one heart.
Asher Katz is the Ein Prat representative in New York. Ilan Greenfield is a board member of the Ein Prat Leadership Academy and chief executive officer of Gefen Publishing.