Rationale Timora’s innovative ground-breaking approach, based on over a decade of experience, believes in “work within alliances and relationships” which helps adolescents grow and thrive through managing their own daily routines and relationships within a supportive therapeutic environment.
By establishing a safe haven that invites dialogue and acknowledgment, the program provides a restorative experience that endows students with the sense of competence needed to succeed in the outside world. Timora enhances the teenagers at risk’s sense of competence, and enables them to renew their bonds with family, find their place in the community, and embark on a new and better path. In all four frameworks, Timora applies a three-pronged strategy, working on education; family and community; and integration in the next stage of life.
In addressing education, Timora helps our teenagers at risk complete their formal education and finish high school. Towards this, students’ confidence in their ability to succeed is reinforced, and they are taught life skills for future success.
Work at the family/community level is geared to helping them find their way back into their own families, which serve as foundations for lifelong stability and individual progress.
Finally, we strive to enable participants to integrate into the frameworks of the next stage in their life, including the IDF, higher education, and the workplace. Gradually, self-esteem, independence, and personal identity are carefully rekindled and developed.
Timora’s Educational Work Focuses on Emotional and Spiritual Aspects The essence of Timora’s educational work with youth focuses on the emotional and spiritual aspects. We believe that adolescence is a critical developmental stage. It is the time to design the individual’s psyche by means of “work through communication”.
Timora focuses on the skills to form a healthy and sound relationship with our surroundings, but first and foremost with ourselves. We must learn to accept ourselves, and then make peace with our environment, family, G-d, and nature. Timora believes that everything starts and ends with relationships. Hence, it is most important for our youth at risk to develop their emotional skills and build meaningful relationships with the world around them.
Timora’s attention is focused on the emotional aspect due to an understanding that once the spirit is calm, organized and balanced, a hunger for the physical, cognitive, and educational domains thrives. This work has been developed over the years via “dynamic education”, a form of language and tools which brings our work to life. Every interaction with staff members (from the head of the dormitory, teachers, the home cook, or the bus driver) is guided by a process of emotional training.
Our vision is for our youth to take everything they experience and learn with us, and apply it at all stages of life – from high school, through to the IDF or National Service, into their careers and, of course, into family life. Timora believes that this educational path should be implemented in every educational framework, even the most normative. Educators essentially direct the cognitive processes, but the main challenge is not developing cognitive abilities but rather emotional, moral and psychological capacities.
It is a proven fact that if our emotional world is balanced, we are open to additional areas of growth. For teenage youth, such balance may settle violent tendencies, create motivation and push toward achievement.