In 2001, Shula, the manager of a social services department in a small, nearby town, approached the Spitzer Social Work Department at Ben-Gurion University with an unusual request: to help her to work with the poorest and most excluded families in the municipality in order to ‘wean’ them off their ‘long-term dependency’ on social services. That request gradually led to the creation of a group of service users that met regularly once a week for two-anda-half years, called ‘The Light at the End of the Tunnel’. This chapter tells the story of that group and focuses on its challenging first meeting. At that time, the PAP was still only a theoretical outline that, through this intervention, started to develop as practice and to become more clearly delineated. Specifically, this chapter deals with the challenge of creating solidarity and making connections in divisive situations.

A few weeks before I joined the Spitzer Social Work Department at Ben-Gurion University, the department was approached by one of its graduates, Shula, with an unusual request. She had recently taken up a new post as the manager of the municipal social services department in a small, nearby town, and she asked the faculty of the academic department to help her to plan an intervention with the poorest and most excluded families in the municipality. I saw this as an opportunity to work on a challenging project and joined the steering committee, which comprised Shula, her senior team and two of my new colleagues in the school of social work.

Shula said that although the families had been known to the social workers for a long time, many of them since their childhood, meaningful helping relationships had not been established. Her team described a frozen situation in which service users had been coming to the department for years with requests for material aid that the social workers could not meet. Meanwhile, they had refused invitations from the social workers to begin meaningful therapeutic processes. Shula described a situation in which the best therapists that she had were wasting their expensive hours waiting for service users who did not show up to sessions.