Sponsor a Teacher in Gaza
$200 a month pays a displaced teacher — and keeps around thirty children in a classroom.
The teachers of Gaza were displaced with everyone else. Many of them started teaching again within weeks, in tents, in stairwells, in the corner of a shelter, without pay and without being asked.
Sponsoring a teacher is the highest-leverage thing an individual donor can do for education here. One stipend does not help one person — it keeps a class running, which means around thirty children stay in the habit of learning rather than losing another year.
This appeal pays monthly stipends to displaced teachers running classes for children in their own communities.
What a stipend covers, and why it is a stipend
A stipend is not a salary. It is a monthly payment that makes it possible for a teacher to keep teaching instead of spending those hours finding food or work. At $200 a month it covers a household's essential costs in a way that removes the pressure to stop.
We pay monthly rather than as a lump sum because that is how a teacher can plan, and because it keeps us accountable — a stipend continues only while the class does.
- $200 — one teacher, one month, roughly thirty children
- $600 — one teacher for a full term
- $1,200 — half a school year
- $2,400 — a teacher sponsored for a complete year
Why we recruit from the displaced community
Every teacher we support is from the community they teach in. That is not a preference, it is what makes the work survive: they are already there when a route closes, they know which children have stopped coming, and the families know them.
It also means the money stays inside the local economy, which matters in a place where a household's income has often disappeared entirely.
What the classes actually look like
Not much like a school. A class might be twenty-five children of mixed ages in a tent, working through literacy and numeracy in two-hour blocks because that is what the space and the daylight allow. Attendance moves as families move.
What matters is not the setting but the continuity — the same teacher, most days, expecting the same children. For a child who has lost everything predictable, that is worth more than the curriculum.
I stopped being paid a long time before I stopped teaching. The stipend did not make me a teacher again. It made it possible to stay one.