Inna, Volunteer at "Kivunim"- Center for Young Adults in Ashdod
Inna was born in Ukraine in 1987, and her family immigrated to Israel and settled in Ashdod, Israel when she was three years old. She is a third-year B.Sc. student of chemical engineering at the Sami Shamoon College of Engineering in the Negev, and lives with her parents, sister, and grandmother.
Inna graduated from high school with a full matriculation, and then enlisted in the National Service at the Ashdod Psychological Health Center for Children, Youth and Family, where she was responsible for intake and basic psychological assistance. Having proven herself capable and enthusiastic, the Center’s staff placed additional responsibilities on her, including managing funds and databases.
Inna’s family has financial difficulties, and she must not only pay her own way through college but also contribute to the household finances, as well as help with basic chores. In order to help her family—and because she cannot afford both tuition and rent—she continues to live in the family’s apartment.
Given her own success in navigating through an immigrant childhood and setting off on a promising career, Inna is a natural peer educator and role-model for immigrant youth. Over the past two years she has worked as a personal mentor for young immigrants in a student volunteer framework and as a group mentor in a program of the Ashdod municipality. In conjunction, through the municipal Youth Promotion Department, she encourages youth who have dropped out of high-school, mainly immigrants from the former Soviet Union or Ethiopia, to take matriculation exams and tutors them in math and English.
Inna also serves as a counselor to immigrant young adults in JDC's Center for Young Adults in Ashdod, advising them on employment, education, and social issues. In this role, she has organized various projects including a Purim party at a local immigrant absorption center, a Passover Seder for soldiers who made aliya without their families, and a workshop in financial management for immigrant students.
In addition, Inna also tries to make time for reading, photography, walks on the beach with her dog, and baking.
JDC's Centers for Young Adults
Israel’s immigrant population includes some 250,000 young adults (ages 18-30) who made aliyah or were raised in immigrant families. Many of these young adult immigrants are struggling to find their place in Israeli society, due to their families’ unresolved economic, social, and cultural difficulties. A lack of services at this crucial age, when life-shaping decisions about army service, higher education, and job options are made, has led to a high rate of chronic unemployment—over 30 percent—among this group. As a result, potentially contributing Israeli citizens are being cast to the margins of Israeli society.
Centers for Young Adults are established in cities which are home to large immigrant populations. Open to all young adults, they serve as a central and non-stigmatizing platform for launching projects to help young immigrants. Centers provide a wide range of counseling and orientation services under one roof, including guidance regarding higher education and vocational training; job skills such as how to find and keep a job, as well as advance in the workforce; life skills, such as money management, volunteering projects, housing advice, and courses on key skills for education and employability.
