Friday, December 22, 2006

22-Dec-06: An End-of-Year Call to Action

For many people, we're approaching the end of the financial year. A good time to remind you of the voluntary work we (the bloggers behind this site) do and have done since September 2001.

We lost our child to an act of barbaric murder and incomprehensible hatred. Our response has been to create the Malki Foundation in our daughter's name and to raise money and distribute it very efficiently in a way that allows us to do a lot good. You can get the whole picture at the website of the Malki Foundation. But if you're click-resistant, here's the brief version.

For Israeli families (Jews, Christians, Moslems, Druze, others) who have a special-needs child like the little boy above being helped by his brother, we provide substantial subsidies to enable five kinds of therapy: physical, occupational, speech, water and horse-riding. This subsidy is given without limit, provided the child is being cared for at home and not institutionalized. The parents decide how much therapy, which therapies and which therapist. We aim to empower them, and certainly not to patronize or direct them. They get enough of that from the establishment.

We also provide long-term free loans of home-care equipment like beds, wheelchairs, walkers and standers. The goal, again, is to make home-care a real option for such families.

In a country which has some fine institutional solutions, we believe that home care is and always will be the best option for a child with serious disabilities. For those who agree (not everyone), we want to help in our murdered daughter's name. We are doing this today for many hundreds of families with a special-needs child.

We have a blind, severely-disabled eleven year old child at home (she attends a special school but sleeps at home) and came by our opinions the authentic way - by living the experience, by fighting the establishment and by learning how to work around the schlerosis in the system in order to do substantial good. And for those to whom this sort of statistic is important, nearly a third of the families we support month-in, month-out are Arab.

If you're in a position to help us by making a 2006 fiscal-year donation, we can promise it will be honestly and effectively applied. And if you're living in the United States or Israel, we can provide you with a tax-deduction for your contribution. Details here.

1 comment:

Oz_in_Zion said...

Unfortunately, it's necessary for us to say again that we will not allow any anonymous hate messages to be posted here. We get a steady stream of haters and cranks visiting our site. If they want to post anonymous messages propagating their message of intolerance, hatred, racism and such, we're not inclined to help. As anyone who browses the web knows, there's no shortage of blogs and sites with crackpot viewpoints, and no reason for us to compete with them.