Michal Eskenazi
15
How do you intend to make your work and your conferences affect the political level?
At present there are a few levels. In the organization, we are networking and exposing people to our work as well as working on public relations. Every year we mark YIFC's birthday. It's an excuse to celebrate and we organize a meeting and invite a lecturer from another organization. This year we held the birthday meeting at the Floerscheimer Institute and they did a presentation of scenarios concerning the future of Jerusalem. We invite people to introduce them to our work; we invite officials, too. We publish our conference conclusions in reports. We try to emphasize the importance of the role young leadership has [to play] and select people who have not yet been exposed to this issue and who can reach decision makers. We also have a few ideas for joint projects with people from the field of technology in different areas who are influential and could affect the field, which is important. I must say, it isn't easy. We all volunteer, none of us get paid and this affects our work in both positive and negative ways. The positive aspect is that people act out of pure motivation because it is important to them. This is very clear at meetings; people are very busy with their lives, our schedules run until nine or ten pm but in spite of this, people still manage to do something else, and this is a big advantage. The negative aspect is that people have less time to invest in this work because they have to survive, financially speaking, or have prior commitments. I know there are things we could do more quickly, but because we only check in at night to see what happened all day, it takes longer. That's okay; we are progressing and things are working out.