The Development of an Outreach Strategy in the Jaffa Arab Community

This paper describes the efforts of a team of Arab and Jewish marriage and family counsellors in Israel to design effective intervention strategies for the Arab community in the mixed Arab-Jewish town of Jaffa, Tel Aviv. In the first stage, which combined traditional outreach and the participation of the community's Arab leadership, we strove to overcome both Arab cultural prohibitions against seeking outside help and the population's distrust of Jewish services. When this did not bring the population to make fuller use of the services, we shifted our efforts to bringing the clinic to the public in the form of non-committal, non-consecutive workshops dealing with family communication skills, open to anyone who wished to attend.