From haaretz.com

It’s early evening in the Hadar neighborhood of downtown Haifa, and a few members of the Noar Haoved Vehalomed youth movement were waiting for the rest of their group, when suddenly a woman screamed “Help! Stop, thief!” A tall young man in a black coat had grabbed the woman’s purse but after being chased a short distance by a young man in the street, the thief threw it away and disappeared. In another case that same night, a couple was arrested for robbing an 82-year-old woman. Robberies, drugs and street gangs are not as common as they used to be these past few months. Not since the municipality of Haifa, together with the police and social action groups started a project to restore the center-city neighborhood to its former glory.

The city called on 70 young people from all over the country, members of the Noar Haoved Vehalomed youth movement, to establish an urban kibbutz to work with the neighborhood’s at-risk youth.

“Instead of a kibbutz raising cows, we are cultivating education,” the coordinator of the kibbutz, Yuval Becker, 27, of Kfar Sava, said. The goal of the group, known as Kibbutz Mehanchim (Hebrew for “educators”) is to create an alternative to street crime for the neighborhood’s youth. “Some of the children we work with have a police record for drugs and property crime,” Keren Sagi, 26, from Mazkeret Batya, said, “and our goal is to prevent them from getting into even more serious crime when they get older.”