Welcome to the first TAU international Volunteers-managed blog! This blog has been created to give complementary information to the graduated students of TAU and to create a community where we can share thoughts and information. This blog is not affiliated to any of the TAU services or bureaucratic apparatus and it is meant to be an informal tool where people can be updated, alongside the Whatsapp group and the informal word-of-mouth. Each student or post-doc is more than welcome to approach and participate in the creation of this blog, acting as a volunteer (with a little basic commitment) but also as an user, where they can collect any sort of information. All of the content posted on this blog is under the responsibility of the person who wrote it and posted it. UPDATE 06.11.23 Guidelines for the WhatsApp group 1.Respect & Kindness: Treat all members with respect and kindness. Be mindful of your tone and language. 2. Stay On Topic: Keep discussions releva...
In these days, we received an invitation (with the words below) via social media to join a project called Tenants' committee
"If you too are tired of the unacceptable treatment from the dorm management, the intrusion of privacy, the restrictions on guests, the complete indifference, and their racism, then you should join us tonight for the first tenant’s meeting. In which we can all share our frustrations with the way the dorms are being run and start working together to change it! We must stand together if we want to make a real difference 💪🏼💪🏾💪🏿"
The Tenants' committee is a group of representatives of the people living in the dorms (TAU and outside) self-elected as members.
The idea of becoming part of the committee is to act as a social person who highlights the problems within the dorms and takes action to improve the life conditions of all of their inhabitants.
The first meeting was an introduction to what is the purpose of this campaign:
1) what are the demands we are raising as tenants?
2) who is the recipient of these demands?
3) what kind of action can be done to achieve a change of the situation?
Since the short time and the enormous amount of inputs, the committee basically focused on what kind of problems tenants face and how to split among the presents (around 20 people!) the jobs-to-be-done in order to create a task force that will try to negotiate for a change. And this is the 1 million question: who is the recipient of the demands? Probably the dorm company, but first and foremost TAU.
The University has a quite big interest to support people in terms of reputation and attractiveness: the goal is to invite researcher all around the world to stay in Tel Aviv (and therefore in TAU), provided that the work/life conditions are valuable for all of us. Unfortunately, this does not seem to be the case and the dorm company is not really accommodating.
The University, meanwhile, has hired a Dorm supervisor who should be able to oversee the situation. Obviously, one person can't do much, compared to the problems of big numbers of students living in the dorms.
It is important to note that the University and the Dorm company have a client-seller relationship, and the University is potentially capable of changing the agreements, that's why all of the members of the Tenants' committee are positive about the outcome of this action. "Everything is about power, and nothing is written in the stones. The more we are, the more powerful we can be. And these things make the difference" - said one of the leaders of the committee.
Said so, how to proceed?
People have been split in 3 groups. Someone can deal with the ideation of the demands, some others will help spreading the news and the information with advertising, word of mouth and so on... and someone else will organize the logistics for the final action, where all of the people supporting this campaign will support this initiative.
As always, people were concerned about becoming an easy target, so there is an ongoing debate about the privacy. The common opinion is that being anonymous is important for the freedom of expression and to avoid any kind of disciplinary action.
Yes, you heard well! During the discussion tonight, a story about a person who allowed some people in the dorms to let them hang the advertising panels (about the Tenants' committee) had to face a disciplinary internal trial, which hopefully will end well for them. This is not only a wish, but a statement due to the fact that people from the Student Union are advocating for this person.
What is the Student Union? LINK
What can we do as single tenants?
I would like to collect the problems and the needs of the tenants of the dorms in an anonymous form, so that I can forward to the committee the list of demands to change the status quo.
If you want to contribute, share your thoughts by filling the form at this link.
Otherwise, you might want to use the more generalized form, which has been circulating for a while. It is written in Hebrew, Arabic and English LINK
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