1. Program Overview

• Program name:
• Season / dates:
• Location(s): Juthour / Mashjar Juthour
• Primary focus: Ecology, education, infrastructure, community events
• Program leads / main contacts:
  • On-the-ground coordinator (OTG): Saleh Totah
  • Remote / admin contact:
• Language(s) used in the program: Arabic / English / other

Preface

This induction pack is intended to offer honest and open communication for volunteers to reflect on before joining the program. Your contribution is important and your presence is deeply valued.

Because Palestine is under occupation, consistency and safety need to be carefully held in all of our engagements. Relationships of trust are built over time, through continuity and mutual showing up. If you have any questions or concerns at any point, please reach out to a volunteer coordinator. Their details are at the end of this document.

Program Story and Context

Juthour sits on ancestral land in the hills near Beit Jala, Palestine—a place that has witnessed centuries of cultivation, care, and connection. For generations, this land was tended by hands that knew the rhythm of the seasons, the patience required to coax life from stone and soil, and the deep responsibility of stewardship.

Like so much in Palestine, the story of this land also carries fracture: displacement, neglect, and the erosion of ecological and cultural memory under occupation.

When the Totah family began returning to Juthour, they were not just reclaiming property—they were rekindling a relationship. They found a landscape scarred by years of abandonment, yet still breathing. Wild grasses pushed through cracked earth. Ancient olive trees, gnarled and patient, waited. The land was calling for care, and the family answered with a vision that reaches beyond personal restoration.

Juthour's vision is rooted in five interwoven commitments:

• Arboretum: To create a living library of native and regionally adapted trees and plants—a sanctuary of biodiversity that honours what has grown here for millennia and what can thrive here into the future.
• Nature Preserve and Ecological Education: To protect this land as habitat, as classroom, and as a place where people can learn directly from the earth: how ecosystems function, how to regenerate soil, and how to live in reciprocity with the more-than-human world.
• Legacy: To ensure that this land remains in Palestinian hands, cared for and accessible to future generations, as an act of cultural continuity and resistance against erasure.
• Revenue: To develop sustainable income streams—through ecotourism, education programs, plant nurseries, and other ventures—that allow the land to support itself and the people who tend it, without extraction or compromise.