Kaima Institute (Machon Kaima)
For the Study of Relationships Among People, Society, and Living Environments
Too often, learning, healing, and work are confined to classrooms, clinics, and offices, settings that simply don't suit everyone. Kaima has found that social farming offers another way, weaving agriculture together with education, welfare, and mental health care so that the farm itself becomes a place where people and nature flourish together. A farm depends on the daily care of the people who tend it. When that responsibility is shared, the farm grows into a living environment that fosters personal growth, workforce readiness, a sense of belonging, and renewed resilience after trauma.
From the Fields to a Methodology
As social farming has spread across Israel, with dozens of initiatives now operating, many new farms have opened without an agreed framework or professional standards. Having founded Israel's first social farm and led the movement ever since, Kaima created the Kaima Institute to close this gap.
The Kaima Institute is the movement's central hub for conceptual development, teaching, and the dissemination of our methodology. Situated in the fields of our prototype farm just outside Jerusalem, it operates as a living field laboratory, a space for ongoing observation and applied research into the relationships among people, society, and their living environments, where insights flow directly back into practice. The Institute's work focuses on developing a common professional language, training leaders of social farming sites, and advancing policy and infrastructure across the field.
Our approach grew out of the soil, shaped by nearly fifteen years of daily work on our farms alongside young people whose lives have been upended by crisis, combat soldiers and reservists returning from service, and many other groups with distinct needs. Over the years, in-depth research has examined and documented this work, measuring its impact and helping to distill it into a structured methodology that can be taught and put into practice.
Four Pillars of Practice
The Institute's training programs and courses bring together the practical knowledge that comes from working the land and professional, research-based expertise. They are designed for practitioners in therapy, education, rehabilitation, and community work who want to deepen their practice of social farming, and they offer practical, research-based tools for guiding meaningful processes of change.
The programs are built on four methodological pillars:
Working shoulder to shoulder
When everyone shares in physical, productive work, familiar hierarchies such as "therapist and patient" or "strong and weak" fall away. What remains is human connection grounded in equality, the foundation for any meaningful process.
Relationships across generations
The farm functions as a living, multi-generational community. The coursework explores how to build a diverse social environment where mutual responsibility and a natural sense of belonging ease loneliness and restore stability and security.
Conscious non-doing & supportive presence
One of the hardest skills for professionals to develop is the ability to hold back, setting aside the automatic urge to fix or manage in order to listen, make room, and respect each person's natural pace of development.
Agency, choice, and concrete results
Taking responsibility for real agricultural work restores a sense of control and personal capability. Progress is measured in visible, concrete results, allowing participants to experience the power of their choices and their impact on the world around them.