Good Friday Gift 2022: Growing the Capability of the Diocese of Jerusalem

In 2022 you gave generously to our Good Friday Gift so that we were able to send $30,000 to the Diocese of Jerusalem for providing training in Strategic Planning for the leaders of its 30 social outreach institutions in five countries and territories.

One of the participants, 58-year-old Iyad Rafidi, is the director of the Arab Evangelical school in Ramallah, Palestine, one of 16 schools belonging to the Diocese.  

Mrs Rafidi said of the training, “It provided us with guidance on how to prepare a strategic plan including the goal, the objectives, and main components. It gave us guidance and main steps that we need to go through in order to develop a strategic plan for our school.

“We learnt that preparing a strategic plan is a teamwork, where all the school staff should be involved.

“Actually. before the training, I was thinking that developing a strategic plan was exclusively the responsibility of the head of institution, who will in turn impose it on the staff, however, in the training we learnt that it is a participatory process, where each of the staff members is involved in it.

“Involving the staff in the process will ensure their commitment to implement it. Moreover, we learnt that the board of directors for the school should also be involved”, she concluded.

The Diocese of Jerusalem comprises 28 parishes, with about 30 priests, and serves 7,000 Anglicans spread across the five countries or territories of the Diocese (Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon, Israel and Syria) . In addition, the Diocese also employs about 1,500 people working in its institutions, which include schools, hospitals (including the Al Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza), rehabilitation centres, clinics, and retirement homes. It has about 6,400 students in its schools and about 200 beds in its hospitals.

External experts provided the participatory training, which has equipped the institutions’ leaders with the skills and technical knowledge to lead the strategic planning at their institutions with their staff.

Forty people participated in the training, including 22 women and 18 men. But the impact of the training will be much broader, affecting staff of the institutions, and their students and patients who receive the services, as well as their families.

Through this training, the Diocese reported that they learned the importance of organizing such joint training/workshops for heads of institutions, noting that it has improved teamwork among these leaders and broadened their knowledge of sectors outside their own.

ABM AID would like to express our thanks to all those who supported our Good Friday Gift in 2022. A report on the 2023 Good Friday Gift will follow soon.