The Research Journalism Initiative is dedicated to changing the way students learn about socio-economic, religious and geopolitical conflict by providing students a direct link to regions of conflict abroad. RJI volunteers living in the West Bank seek out dynamic local partners to connect to their counterparts in the United States. Palestinian students share their creative writing, photography, films and other multimedia content, which RJI makes available to educators, free of cost, through our website. Our staff works with teachers to incorporate this material into new and existing curriculum in ways that help teachers reach curricular benchmarks and get the most of these powerful resources. We also work closely with school administrators and parents in order to guide participants through the challenging experience of bringing new and controversial prospectives into the classroom. In addition, RJI facilitates live videoconferences between Palestinian and American students to encourage empathy, honest discourse and critical thinking.

Our history

RJI works to create direct and personal links between US students and their counterparts in Palestine, helping students to move beyond taboos surrounding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Since 2007, RJI has facilitated dynamic online exchanges, encouraging young people to investigate the world pluralistically and cross boundaries of religion, politics and family bias in order to appreciate the identities and needs of other human beings across the globe. Originally established to provide university-level Palestinian journalism students with the equipment and training needed to communicate effectively with international audiences, RJI soon realized that it had much more to contribute than technical assistance. With a keen understanding that Palestinian youths were the best communicators of their own experiences, RJI developed skills of digital, inter-cultural dialogue facilitation and built a network of high school and university educators across the United States dedicated to the pursuit of human rights and social justice. RJI worked with teachers to incorporate Palestinian-produced multi-media content into their existing curriculum and provided students in the United States and West Bank opportunities to engage each other critically through live videoconferencing. As American students began to comprehend the needs and realities of their Palestinian counterparts abroad, RJI helped them to channel their compassion into practical collaborative responses – with transformative results.