Five Questions: The path to greater effectiveness

1. What is the social problem that Wing of Love attempts to solve?
According to Israel’s Ministry of Social Affairs, some 50,000 12 to 17 year-olds engaged in antisocial and even
criminal activity in 2009, some 7% of this age group in Israel. These youths suffer from severe difficulties that
prevent them from functioning normally in society. They express their distress through violence and substance
abuse. British studies have shown that 90% of children who engage in criminal activity under the age of 13
continue their antisocial actions throughout their lifetime.
According the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, a child who is removed from his natural
home by court order has the right to protection and help from the state. There is need to provide education and
therapy to enable these children to change the direction of their lives and choose the path to good citizenship.

2. What does Wing of Love do in order to solve or reduce this problem?
Wing of Love has created a holistic therapeutic framework, including an unlocked hostel for 22 young offenders
and a wildlife park where the boys work and learn every day. The framework provides an intensive program that
aims to return the boys to the classroom to complete their basic schooling, to at least a tenth grade level, while
enabling the more capable boys to achieve their 12th grade exams and diplomas. It also works hard to teach the
boys work skills, prepares them and then helps them to hold down a paid job outside the sheltered framework to
gain work experience before they graduate. In addition the framework prepares the boys for enlistment to the
IDF and finds alternative paths for volunteer work for those who are not suited to serve in the army.

3. What are our achievements?
Some of our graduates have enlisted to the IDF, others have been accepted to voluntary service frameworks
and still others have chosen to go straight into paid employment.
This year we have increased the number of boys in our framework, our therapeutic effort, our work with the
boys’ parents, with volunteers including the Air Force and the Scouts, the number of extra-curricular activities
that the boys engage in, including the Aharay! project, sports, and art. We have measured the progress of each
boy on numerous aspects of their behavior and made changes to our program in order to improve our results.

4. How do we know that we have succeeded to achieve our goals?
We separated out the processes that are involved in the overall goal of rehabilitation of young offenders and
examine the effectiveness of each one. To do this, we write work programs for these processes and measure
the progress of each boy in each program. Thus we measure his progress in scholastic studies in the classroom,
the different aspects of his work with animals, his acquisition of work skills, his cooperation with the staff,
emotional intelligence, and his relationship with his family and with the other boys. We make quantitative
measurements as well as qualitative reports of his progress.

5. What have we learned and how are we improving our activity?
In spring 2011 we performed an in-depth study of the last five years of the organization’s activities with youth at
risk and in September 2011 we did an in-depth study of the progress of the boys in the framework. Both studies
led to important changes. They led to the Director’s increasing the in-service training of staff to enable them to
understand better and work more efficiently to fulfill the organization’s expectations and goals. They also led to
upgrading and fine-tuning the animal-assisted education project and the project training the boys for the work
market, as well as increasing the therapeutic activities, as described on page 2 above.