Emily McKay’s long silver pony tail, sharp mind, lightning paced speech, and endless commitment to repairing the world through citizen action for social change have been annual mainstays at SHATIL for the past 21 years. Two weeks ago, McKay again left her life and her job as director of Mosaica, the Center for Nonprofit Development and Pluralism in Washington DC, and flew to Israel to devote her considerable energies, enthusiasm and experience to helping Israeli social change organizations grow in effectiveness and sophistication.

Although she was based in Jerusalem, SHATIL’s Jerusalem staff hardly saw her. McKay spent most of her time working with staff from SHATIL’s satellite office in Baka El Garbiyeh in the Triangle region.

“There is such a lot going on in the North,” said McKay. “With SHATIL’s help, people are doing such interesting things and, I think, making a lot of progress.”

SHATIL opened its Triangle area satellite nearly two years ago in order to encourage the formation of NGO’s in an area where hardly any existed. The Triangle is home to 230,000 Israeli Arabs.

“Baka el Garbiyeh is absolutely fascinating,” McKay said. “It’s not unlike the Negev was 15 years ago in that many of the NGO’s are new. SHATIL’s staff there is very impressive. They have an absolutely delightful young religious (Muslim) woman doing community organizing. They are dealing with important issues in a ‘big head’ way. This is a wonderful place for SHATIL to be and there’s a lot of long term work to be done.”

Emily McKay

“The most fun and fascinating workshop I was involved in was about presenting to donors. We had seven of the most experienced NGO’s in the Triangle (one Arab-Jewish, the others all Arab) learn about how to explain their work to different kinds of donors. We set up three stations – an American Jewish foundation, a federation and the Italian embassy and had people make presentations which we then critiqued. The Europeans are very interested in Israeli Arabs, but aren’t always certain about the difference between Palestinians in the territories and Arab citizens of Israel. American Jews want to fund the Arab community, but may be nervous about certain terms like ‘Palestinians,’ ‘autonomy,’ ‘Nakba.’ We asked the organizations: How do you take into account these sensitivities and remain ethical?”

During her visit, McKay also helped launch SHATIL’s new financial management assistance program.  Two months earlier, SHATIL resource development consultant Leora Asa spent three weeks training for the program at Mosaica; she and McKay led two half-day workshops in Jerusalem and Haifa for 61 organizations. They conducted financial management assessments for two organizations and Asa will do four more this year.

McKay also helped SHATIL launch our new tri-lingual evaluation handbook and set up an evaluators’ forum aimed at helping organizations integrate evaluation -- also becoming more critical to donors -- into their ongoing work.

“There is increasing expectation on the part of donors for more accountability of the use of their funds,” said McKay. “This area is becoming critical.”

Her eyes lighting up on her last day in Israel, McKay said, “This is one of the best planned and most diverse trips I’ve had. SHATIL is fascinating. It’s always doing something interesting and new.”