Welcome to UrbanPal!
Hello and welcome to our UrbanPal collective! UrbanPal was created by three Palestinian sisters scattered around the world: Meera, Yara, and Tala (aka: MeYaTa).
It’s mainly us running things behind the scenes here: Meera as UrbanPal’s Creative Director and our voice (hi, it’s usually me writing these posts while consulting the girls), Yara as our Managing Director and backbone who was instrumental in finding and growing our UrbanPal family, and Tala as our Chief Designer and artist behind every drawing featured in NAR. Our UrbanPal family includes Palestinian refugee seamstresses working in Jordan, as well as children and women in Gaza, all of whom play vital roles in keeping this ship running.
With each sister on her own journey, we needed to find a way to connect with each other and Palestine that felt authentic and meaningful. Over the years, as we explored what this could look like, our conversations solidified into finding concrete ways to give back to Palestine while appreciating our heritage and culture. In addition, we wanted to shift focus and relearn our history and traditions outside of the context of a brutal occupation.
Much of what we knew about ourselves and our people had been framed within our struggle, but we are so much more than that context allows. We each have our own calling when it comes to our activism, personal goals, and strategies in fighting the Occupation outside of this space and we needed a breath of fresh air. UrbanPal became that for us. And so, we have decided to keep political content to a minimum in our UPal home. We want to simply be Palestinians; to enjoy our culture, and share it with you, in the context of love and appreciation without the added heaviness weighing us down.
We are Palestinians, and that has never and will never change; we have a vibrant history and incredibly passionate culture, at the core of which is love and respect for all humanity and the land we get to live on. We are infinitely thankful that our families taught us who we are and where we come from, regardless of where we were forced to physically be.
Our blood is Palestinian, and we will never stop educating and fighting for Palestine and her people. In this space, we finally get to appreciate Palestine as Palestine, make an impact on our indigenous communities, and share Palestinian beauty and resilience with you to carry wherever you go. We hope you wear our pieces with pride.
Please reach out because we’d love to hear from you as we grow in this space together. Thank you for being a part of our journey, stay tuned to learn more about UrbanPal and if you haven’t already, subscribe to our newsletters! We promise we won't spam you.
Hibkom (love you all),
MeYaTa