Missions & Humanitarian Relief

On June 13, 2025, Israel struck Iran’s nuclear and missile infrastructure. Iran answered with more than 550 ballistic missiles and drones. Hospitals filled, thousands were displaced, and whole blocks came down. Seventeen days later AIC announced an eleven-day relief mission and started assembling volunteers.

Hearts United, Boots on the Ground put an Atlanta volunteer team on the ground beginning July 14 — delivering supplies to families, helping restore damaged classrooms so children could get back to school, and bringing aid packages to IDF personnel. The community funded it two ways: through AIC’s campaign, and by buying items straight off a wish list so a specific box reached a specific family.

“While many understandably flee or seek shelter, AIC’s volunteers are stepping into harm’s way to deliver critical aid.”

— Cheryl Dorchinsky, Co-Founder & Executive Director

That was the fifth direct-aid mission AIC has led since October 7, 2023. Together they add up to more than 200 volunteer days in Israel.

The volunteers pay their own way. Every mission is self-funded — participants buy their own tickets and put in the days — and Cheryl Dorchinsky, who has led this organization since 2018, has never drawn a salary from it. That arrangement keeps the money raised for relief pointed at relief.

AIC does not run these missions alone. Aid goes out with trusted local organizations, because the people who know which family needs what are already there, and AIC works through them. An Atlanta team arriving with its own theory of the need would be one more thing for Israelis to manage.

Presence itself does work that a wire transfer cannot. AIC has made this argument in print: a small act of solidarity — foreign currency spent in a local market, an afternoon of labor for a family that needs it — lifts Israelis in a way a donation from six thousand miles away does not. Some of the most useful hours our volunteers have logged were spent behind a grill, cooking and serving a barbecue for Israeli soldiers under an Israeli flag.

Not all of the work is heavy. On one trip AIC delivered toys to Israeli children in time for Chanukah — a delivery that began as an Atlanta bat mitzvah project, when a young woman named Addison decided the children of Israel should have something to open and AIC helped carry it over. Delegations have sat with Druze community members in Daliyat al-Karmel, planted olive saplings, and stood at the Nova festival site, at Kibbutz Re’im on the Gaza border, and in Hostage Square in Tel Aviv. Footage from those visits is on AIC’s YouTube channel, unedited enough to be worth watching.

Cheryl’s own first wartime trip to Israel was with Momentum, on a mission of mothers supporting mothers — twenty mothers of lone soldiers from around the world among roughly eighty women in total. She has written about what she found there: nobody arguing over politics, Israeli flags on every corner, strangers thanking her in tears for simply being present. AIC has been going back ever since.