The joint initiative to promote welfare in Beer Sheva

About the program

How do we take the university's research knowledge and turn it into practical tools that help residents? At the Prisma Negev Center, we partnered with the Welfare Department of the Beer Sheva Municipality and the Ministry of Social Affairs to bring innovative solutions to the city's most complex social challenges.

This is a focused urban program that connects the Welfare Department at the municipality and the Department of Social Work at Ben-Gurion University. We identified a gap between the social challenges on the ground and the research tools that exist in academia, and we decided to bridge it.

How does it actually work?

Instead of working separately, the academy and welfare teams will combine forces:

Identifying needs: Together, we will map the most pressing challenges in the field of welfare in the city and the gaps in existing services.
Going into the field: We will develop practical projects that will connect our students and researchers to work directly with welfare populations and real needs of the city.
Learning together: We will provide workshops and professional training for welfare teams to share knowledge and improve professional tools.
Developing innovation: We provide support and a framework for new models of community services, family support, and building social resilience.

What do we want to achieve?

We want the university to be a long-term partner in improving social services in Beersheba. Our main goals are:

Establish a joint urban-university welfare center, which will serve as a hub for innovation, research, and evaluation.
Establish a mixed think tank that will focus on a key welfare challenge in the city and solve it.
Assemble mixed field teams of researchers from the university and social workers from the municipality.
Develop measurement and evaluation tools that will help the Welfare Department examine the success and impact of its programs in the field.