During the escalation with Iran, we first and foremost contacted all of our families, reminding them we are here for them. ❤️ Our city coordinators are in constant contact with the families, receiving updates on how they're doing and matching volunteers to families to help with their current needs.
Our volunteers helped families where one parent is in reserve duty and the other is an essential worker, making sure they received all the services they require, helping to maintain critical infrastructure and services for the entire nation.
We provided meals to reservist families by reaching out to catering companies and food businesses, seeking donations of prepared meals. We also recruited more volunteer cooks to keep up with the demand for meals for our families. Volunteers not only prepared and packaged these homemade meals, they also went out into the community, personally delivering them to our reservist families.
We understand the emotional toll of this situation. Every evening this week, we hosted a Zoom meeting for our reservist families, or our city coordinators, or our volunteers in order to address their emotional needs. We provided a space for connection, insight from experts, and tools for coping and helping others in this situation.
Since school was canceled this week, we organized activities for children of reservist families - Zoom sessions, babysitters, activities in shared work spaces, etc - to provide these children with fun activities and give their parents the opportunity to work in peace or just take a break. Each of these Zoom sessions for children had a different activity - a magic show, an illustration workshop, storytime, etc. - we've had over 1000 children watching and participating!
To meet the growing demand, we recruited and trained new volunteers, and we held daily training sessions for new city coordinators (instead of twice weekly), quickly increasing our ability to reach more families. In the last few days hundreds of new volunteers have joined and also over 100 new city coordinators!
We also provided special assistance to reservist families whose homes were damaged by the missiles from Iran. We have several families that are dealing with this situation, and we are there for them, helping them with what they need.
Operation Rising Lion Activities
During Operation Rising Lion, HaOgen quickly lept into action. Our city coordinators and volunteers remained in close contact with families, providing personalized assistance—from delivering hot meals and matching volunteers to essential-worker households, to organizing emotional support sessions and fun Zoom activities for children during school closures. We expanded our team rapidly, training hundreds of new volunteers and city coordinators to meet rising needs. We also offered direct aid to reservist families whose homes were damaged by Iranian missiles.