Organising Twinning and Friendship Links - the way Camden is doing it

Camden Abu Dis Friendship Association is a Camden organisation dedicated to promoting human rights in Abu Dis. Along with others in Palestine, people in Abu Dis suffer abuses of human rights as a result of the Israeli occupation and its practices, for example the construction of the Separation Wall. We are promoting friendship links and twinning not as an end in itself but because we believe this is an effective way to draw the human rights situation in Abu Dis to the attention of people in Camden and to work with others locally to do something about it.

CADFA is organised as a trust which is applying for charitable status which allows us to campaign as well as to raise funds for practical projects. We have to be clear who are the people to take the decisions in the organisation, so we have a formal membership for which we charge a small amount per year. However, we want to include as many people as we can in our activities, and we have open meetings once a month. Anyone sympathetic to our aims is welcome to come and take part.

Much of the practical work of CADFA is done however through links groups, which work on particular areas such as education, health, women, youth, unions… We welcome the development of new links groups when there are particular areas of interest. The different links groups work in different ways, each deciding on their own projects but keeping in close touch with the CADFA trustees and reporting to the open meetings each month. Each links group is asked to work with both sides – Camden and Abu Dis. In Camden, the work is to extend the understanding of human rights abuses in Abu Dis within the area of the links group – so, for example, the education links group encourages teachers, governors, lecturers to take an interest in the education and human rights situation in Abu Dis. With Abu Dis, the work is to develop useful projects – so, for example, the community links group has raised money for a community centre in Abu Dis.

The links groups produce their own events and leaflets etc and also promote the general CADFA literature. So far, this has been a successful way to spread CADFA work through Camden.

Of course many of the projects will help more than one links group, and directly serve the aims of CADFA as a whole. For example, the women’s links group is organising a visit of women from Abu Dis to Camden, which will also be useful for the other links groups (in this case, health, education, student and human rights links) – and we expect, from our experience when other visitors came over, that this will really push forward the understanding in Camden of the human rights situation in Abu Dis and the number of people wanting to be active in doing something about it.

In order to keep the work of CADFA moving, we have a number of people with special responsibilities – chair, secretary, treasurer, press officer. We also make sub-groups (such as the art sub-group who have organised a travelling exhibition, designed Christmas cards and T-shirts etc). To date, each links group has set off on its own fundraising for its projects, but as CADFA gets bigger and incurs more expenses, we wonder if it would be useful to have a fundraising sub-group for CADFA as a whole.

Communicating with supporters in Camden is very important and we do this mainly by email. As the numbers of supporters have spread into the hundreds we have cut down on expensive mailouts, but we know that relying on email cuts some people out and we are not entirely happy about it. We are considering having ward representatives in each ward in Camden who can deliver things locally, which would be things to our supporters in each ward, and also leaflets etc to community noticeboards and venues local to them. This is a big project we are still working on but hope to make it happen in the next year.

CADFA - 2005

• Link to the Britain- Palestine Twinning Network