Join the village surrounding our babies with learning, love, art, & play!

Small Hands Schools operate in the tent camps of Rafah, al-Mawasi, Khan Younes, Beir al-Dalah, Nuseirat, and wherever our talented young teachers and facilitators (surviving students and recent grads from Gaza's now-erased high schools and universities) have been displaced. We offer emotionally safe zones for children to release their constant grief, trauma, and anxiety through diverse forms of art therapy, games, physical challenges, and community connection. Our kids are deeply bonded to Director Amani Babers, a talented young portrait artist, toddler mom, and displaced survivor of multiple wars-on-Gaza. She intimately understands how to support healthy emotional expression and empathy development through established arts therapy practices, autonomy-building exercises, and confidence-inspiring play challenges.

Our activities provide a renewed sense of control, resilience, and trust in their own abilities, along with healthy new coping mechanisms for the devastating challenges ahead. Ultimately, we help to ensure they experience daily moments of trauma relief by feeling loved, seen, and creatively supported in the worst of times, in the world's most dangerous place to be a child. A child that grows up with extreme hardship, with loving guidance to channel their experiences into creative expression becomes an empowered agent for truth and change. They are able to negotiate their own recovery and wellness by reproducing the tools and grounding we make available at Small Hands.

Our best examples of this are the individual child advocates that make up our Small Hands Family, like Keffiya Youth, a team of six young influencers that have responded to the horrors of their own profound community loss by sponsoring pop-up schools in honor of their young martyred relatives. They also provide Fresh Fruit and Play Workshops for camp kids and orphans and shawarma lunches for abandoned elders and their attending doctors. As prolific talents, Keffiya Youth produce a continuum of fresh, on-the-ground educational videos for the world to understand their first-person challenges as students in a genocide.

It is our hope to expand the schools to include more children by purchasing tents, tables, art supplies, games equipment, and educational supplies. We also hope to provide income and job opportunities for our volunteers, the teachers and child advocates who've been continuously displaced from all over Gaza. Some members of the Small Hands Family have been displaced over ten times, all of them have lived through multiple wars-on-Gaza, and everyone has lost their family home and sources of family income. But together we are building something meaningful and life-giving. This includes you, our global Small Hands Village.

Please donate at the link! You can designate your funds for specific projects in the form. Thank you for being here and standing with us. We are living our best, most meaningful lives in this nightmare, but we have big dreams for this to end, so we can begin our own lives and families. We are doing everything we can, have prayed for your support, and could not be more grateful that you are joining our global family!

Support SMALL HANDS SCHOOLS, Gaza

Send trauma relief, learning, play, and art therapy where kids need it most.