h/t Rachel Baram

When Adi Altschuler was 12 years old and living in the city of Hod HaSharon she volunteered to spend time with a freckle-faced 3-year-old boy with cerebral palsy named Kfir Kobi. “He was like a brother to me. We were close friends and I used to tell him all my secrets,” she says. As the years went by, Altschuler realized that most children who lived with disabling conditions like cerebral palsy didn’t have a friend like her – or any friends at all.

With her sense of activism growing, Altschuler joined LEAD, a non-profit youth leadership organization that gives Israeli teenagers experience in planning, implementing and managing community projects. At LEAD, she was asked to think about a problem that troubled her. What if every boy like Kfir, she wondered, could have an able-bodied, older friend like her? A mentor and carer who might expose them to new experiences, a person who was not a member of their family and who might make them feel less isolated from society and their peers. The idea for a new youth movement was born, and she named it Krembo Wings. (A Krembo is a chocolate-covered marshmallow treat popular among Israeli children.)

Read More

Israeli Adi Altschuler