PACC November Monthly Newsletter

November 2020

PACC’s Monthly Newsletter

Meat Vouchers for Families in Need With funds from an Islamic Relief Grant and the generosity of Al-Hilal Meat and Fish Market and Jerusalem Supermarket, we were able to help 170 families that consisted of 189 women, 160 men and 408 children with 100 $75 vouchers and 70 $80 vouchers.

Our Best Giving Tuesday Fundraiser to Date!

We raised $32,188 from 488 supporters for our GivingTuesday campaign and won $1,500 in prizes from Launchood.com! We will be able to send 20 people to experience Palestine and hold national virtual tours of Palestine for many more, building deep connections with Palestine and inspiring countless people to keep fighting for the future of Palestinians everywhere.

This has been our most successful GivingTuesday to date! We are making a difference in our community and we are very lucky to have you as part of our PACC family! This is your community, your center, your legacy! Thank you!

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Teaching our Community about the importance of Mental Health & the dangers of Heart Disease Thanks to you and our partnerships with Wafa House and Wellcare, we were able to bring educational workshops to the women of our community through our monthly women’s brunches. This past month, we held two workshops, one about the dangers of heart disease and the other centered around mental health.

We Got Out the Vote this past Election Day! We took up three main platforms to make sure our community Got Out The Vote: phone banking, text messaging, and accessible dissemination of voting information.

Collectively, our team of 13 young interns in addition to efforts from our internal staff - were able to make 4,251 calls and sent out 3,260 text messages to our local community and beyond. After sending our last day reminder to vote, about 25 people called us back on election day. At least 5 people also came into our center in person to help them go through all the materials of the mail-in ballot package, and to ensure that they had properly filled out and signed the ballot before mailing it in or dropping it off. Beyond calls and texts, our most unique GOTV outreach effort was our General Election Voter Information resource booklet, which we provided to the community in both Arabic and English.

We held a Debunking Thanksgiving Campaign Eman Ghanayem facilitated a conversation as part of our Palestine Monday series that challenged the American myth of Thanksgiving, and provided a critical intervention that centered on indigeneity & settler-colonialism.

This discussion highlighted Palestinian-Indigenous relations and the intersections of both struggles against the US and Israel. We have over 30 participants join the event, and a very lively discussion afterwards of people who were grateful for all they learned. One participant thanked us for teaching correct history that is not found easily, and others loved the event so much that they suggested hosting similar ones to other Palestinian/Arab communities nationwide. In addition, we launched a successful Debunking Thanksgiving social media campaign that reached 5,064 people.

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We started a 3-part Education and Awareness Series on Substance Abuse Drug abuse is a very real and dangerous issue in our community, and we recognize the need to build safe and brave spaces for members of our community to comfortably seek and find support. We created a three part workshop series to address this issue. On November 18th, Dr. AbdulRahman Jetawi facilitated the first workshop which was streamed live on Youtube, Facebook, and Instagram with 1,450 total views and high engagement during our Q&A/discussion portion.

We Launched Tik Tok We are excited to announce that we will now be posting Palestinian/arab related Tik Tok on our Instagram page every Tuesday! Aside from that we will now begin to post Tik Tok’s on our Tik Tok page as well. Follow us on Tik Tok at @PACC_USA to watch our weekly Tik Tok’s!

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Program Updates: tutoring Thanks to you and the Office of Faith Based Initiatives Special Projects grant, our tutoring program is more successful than it has ever been! We have 4 consistent, dedicated tutors and at least 10 students . We created student portfolios, and are in contact with schools to ensure the success of our students.

Dabka The first session of our program is almost coming to an end and our students’ progress has improved. Seeing how far they’ve come shows how dedicated our students are.

Dabka can be a bit challenging at times, but our instructors demonstrate the patience needed to work with our different age levels. Shout out to our wonderful instructors Lydia Azzam, Eman Assaf, and Ayman Shabib for being great mentors to our students.

Arabic Our Program Manager, Sr. Summai Shahin, has done a tremendous job keeping our students safe and motivated. This month we sent home progress reports and all students are moving in the right direction. Our virtual options accommodate our students who are unable to make in-person classes and provides parents with the flexibility they need to keep their children in our program.

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Follow us on our social media! website: www.PACCUSA.org Instagram: @PACCUSA facebook: Palestinian American Community Center tik tok: @PACC_USA