About

The Civic Cabinet is a collaborative, volunteer-based Think Tank, seeking to address the most urgent challenges of the State of Israel. The project puts together leading experts, a team of young professionals, and insights from the public. We are here to shape a better future for Israel, together.

Background

The project was founded on March 2020, at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic in Israel. We all shared a deep desire to help the government handle the crisis, while seeing how mistakes are being made from the very beginning. We succeeded to contribute a professional voice to the national policy discussion, but we all experienced the absence of a proper decision-making process.

We found lack of rigorous policy analysis, absence of innovative thinking and almost no critical approach within government. These shortcomings have led us to build Cabinet 2.0, and go beyond the Covid-19 crisis, and ask questions on how to rebuild the way Israel manages itself. It is time for us to have a different, positive, inclusive, and collaborative future.

Ideology

We share Jewish, social, and democratic values, and pursue two major goals:

1. The State of Israel, as the state of the Jewish people, must be pioneering and inclusive in managing our needs, promote inclusion and mobility, and create equal opportunities for all. We want to build a role-model for others ("Light to the Nations").
2. ‍The State of Israel, as a democratic state, needs to incorporate knowledge, expertise, and insights from a wider range of the public on its decision-making processes. We are paying for government and we are supposed to get proper ROI. This is our money.

Differentiation

There are some things we do differently:

• ‍Seeking radical change: The Cabinet has a diverse team that thinks differently and is looking for pioneering solutions.
• Collaborative approach: The Cabinet incorporates advice from citizens in its work, through a consultation site and roundtables.
• Quick & effective process: The Cabinet was built to generate policy papers within days or weeks, with clear recommendations.
• Government knowledge: The Cabinet has experienced experts and a professional team who knows how the system works.

We do not publish op-eds (we are not a newspaper), we are not partisan (but we do have an agenda and are active on promoting it), we do not get paid from the government (and we are not its consulting company), and we are doing advocacy.

Outcomes

We measure each publication by the impact it had on decision making (budgets or regulations), and the number of briefings we've had with decision makers. We also scrutinize the number of references to our work in the media.

Priorities

A lot of issues are at hand, but time and attention are limited, and the activity is volunteer based. This is what we ask to prioritize issues we're working on: 

1 Number of citizens the issue might influence.

2 Extent of damage that might be caused from a mistake.

3 The ability to influence the way decisions are made.

4 The likelihood of mistake if nothing will be published.

Contact

You can contact us through our Facebook page or our e-mail address.