Over 3 million refugees have fled across Syria’s border into Turkey since the conflict began in 2011. Half of this population are kids of school age, and education is the number one opportunity they miss leaving their lives & families behind. The refugees who are living in different cities-outside the state-operated refugee camps big miss on education opportunities; instead of going to a regular school with predictive schedules, these children bring income by doing odd jobs with abysmal pay and help their widow moms or families . There is a huge opportunity gap beyond any number we can share as these children don’t’ get the required skills to cope with the challenges, and get integrated into the Turkish society. In 2015, a 16-year-old child who was interviewed by Human Rights Watch said “When I picture my future, I see nothing.” It is so sad that she had no real hope for a better future because she cannot go to school. If we fail to close this education gap, it will put an entire generation at risk.
Bridge to Turkiye Fund (BTF) is one of the few US based non-profit global organization investing in funds for the projects that helps in reducing the education gap for these vulnerable children. In 2017, in collaboration with Assoc. Prof. Dr. Selcuk Sirin from New York University, we invested in the production and distribution of a preschool education kit called “Getting Ready for School” for the refugee children ages 4–6. The original kit was in Turkish and we translated into Arabic and collaborated with 4 NGOs that provides social services and educational activities in different parts of Turkey.
One of the associations that we collaborated in the summer of 2017 is Citizens’ Assembly (formerly known as Helsinki Citizens’ Assembly) established in 1993. It is a civil society organization working on fundamental rights and freedoms, peace, democracy and pluralism. It aims to introduce values such as life with dignity, the rule of law and justice, accountable, transparent and participatory public administration, gender equality as enshrined in international conventions; an economy which does not destroy the social texture and peace, cities and the planet; resolution of conflicts and problems through peaceful negotiations, consultation and dialogue and to ensure that these values be concretely reflected and spread on a civic basis. Citizens’ Assembly’s Refugee Advocacy and Support Program (RASP) is devoted to ensuring the legal protection of refugees and vulnerable migrants in Turkey; monitoring state policies and practice in the area of asylum and irregular migration control; advocating for legislation and policies in line with international standards; and encouraging public awareness and local ownership. They also prepared leaflets in Kurdish, Arabic and Latin for refugees providing general information on the legal framework applicable to them during their stay in Turkey.
A little more about the kits…(see all the pictures below)
The educational kit is designed to engage and educate children with activities by focusing on their visual, fine motor, handwriting, listening comprehension and problem solving skills. The set includes 4 activity books called Seeing, Hearing, Drawing/Writing, Solving as well as a story book and puzzle. There are many coloring, drawing, counting and crafting activities in the books. There are many learning benefits for children to engage in these kind of activities with their peers and educators. Activities aimed at developing and improving concentration & attention skills in small kids. The kit helps in the development of motor skills; hand & eye coordination as the child learns to color within the specified area. As they color and complete their exercises, they create something that is their own, aesthetically pleasing, improving the positive cognitive development of their personality.
Here is what the educators think about the kits…
We delivered 620 educational kits to Citizens’ Assembly to use as a resource in their educational activities for refugee kids in Istanbul. The educators value these because they now have a resource to go to and structure and organize their age appropriate education activities. It became obvious to us that lack of effective resources in refugee education creates hurdle for the teachers and the non-profit organizations serving them. The teachers also like these kits which enables the kids to improve on fine motor skills. Each set comes with a pencil sharpener, crayons, scissors, glue and eraser so that kids can start working on the activities/games and crafts right away in these community centers, and take them back and continue to use at home.
Interestingly, the most valuable resource in the education kit was the story book. The teachers liked it most since the book is written in English, Arabic and Turkish and helps for connectivity and the removal of the language barrier between different ethnicity, Turkish and Arabic speaking kids taking the same workshop or activity. The story time also helps the kids themselves to respect each other, connect with their similarities and differences building friendships even if they don’t speak the same language.
What do the children think about the kits? What do they like best?
Educators used these kits with the children ages from 5 to 15 in the Citizens’ Assembly’s centers in Istanbul.
Given the low rate of enrollment by refugee children in public schools other learning opportunities are crucial to reduce their education gap. The biggest challenge for an NGO who provides education classes, workshops/activities is the lack of resources/tools that help engage kids and encourage them to attend the classes. Our primary goal in this program (invested a total of $50,000 for the production and distribution and other costs) was to support them with tools & resources and help them in preparing children to transition to formal school and daily life in Turkey.
We thank our project collaborators, field educators, and donors who worked with us and supported our EduKit program and many other Refugee Children Programs in the last 2 years. With your continuous support, the refugee children are provided with the healthy development and safe environment to learn because every child, everywhere, deserves a bright future. We would like to thank GlobalGiving platform for connecting us to global donors like you who invested in the education opportunities for the refugee children, and helping them to build a better life. We look forward to another update and sharing your continious impact in the coming months...
Thank You!
Bridge to Turkiye Fund
Progress Report from the field...
It will be really hard to give a project update not revoking our emotions and humanity in this post. As we are sharing our progress about our Syrian refugee program, we will take a moment to recognize many of the hero’s we met last year & "Imece" organization serving refugee children & families who have been the victims of war.
“Imece Initiative” located in Izmir Turkey is founded as a volunteer relief organization in 2014 by students, and has supported local people in need of basic necessities. With the significant refugee migration taking through the Aegean sea in 2015, it shifted its efforts to help refugees. You would recall from the media and the scenes you saw in the news in a period of 6 months, Oct 15 to March 16, about 80,000 refugees went through inflated boats from Cesme Izmir to the Greek island Chios in the hopes of finding a better land to live.
The location of the refugee settlement areas where Imece serves
Many of these people didn't survive, and the ones survived were caught by Turkish Jandarma (armed forces) and rescued from capsized boats. Imece organization provided humanitarian aid for many of these people, families, children, women living though many nightmares and ambiguities to settle into a permanent life. And there came the EU -Turkey deal, which restricted further flow of refugees into European countries, and these migrating refugees ended up settling in the land around Cesme area. Imece has been missioning as life support, from distribution of food, to hygiene products, baby milk, diapers, blankets, heaters & stoves in the last 2 years. In the picture above, you will see their operation locations, and where these families are served.
As BTF, we met with Imece team last year in summer 2016 as they sought investment and partnership for their long-term “Education Village” project. There were many children to care for, and the need to provide a continious learning & development environment was paramount. With this education village concept, children from the areas are going to be brought in the village, and will be offered educational classes, and while their families create a self-funding, sustainable means of supporting their lives. To enable this vision on the education front, we invested $10,000 to finance 3 class size containers in the Fall of 2016. The second and most recent support program we integrated for Imece is the recent distribution of our pre-school education kits which we as BTF invested around $35,000 to produce and distribute via NGO’s serving refugee children living in Turkey.
How did the children find these education kits?
Starting on June 7, so far Imece distributed and used 250 kits in 5 unofficial tent camps (pre-village phase) in the Aegean region of Turkey, They build up an open air classroom in each of those camps once a week and practice latin alphabet and Turkish language with the older children. Meanwhile, the younger children have time to draw and the volunteers coach and play educational games with them. BTF preschool-education kits have enhanced the quality education and provided enrichment activites for children of all ages. We found out, through the feedback from our partners, that even children way older than 7, up to the age of 13 years find the Preschool Education Kits very helpful and enjoyable. Many of the children in Imece program have never been to school in their whole life, thus they are learning to sit down & focus on an education activity, collaborating with their friends. Further, when Imece started the Mobile Education Project in December 2016, they learned quickly that the contents we reckon suitable for the western world needs to be adjusted down for the children who have been though the war, and lacking prior education opportunity. For these reasons the pre-school kits have been valuable to their work for children even older than the kits were meant for. Guided by 2 teachers Jasmin and Mazhar from Imece, the older children used the story books included in the Pre-school education Kit, the younger children used the crayons to draw pictures or enjoyed coloring. The content of the kits blended perfectly into Imece’s program within the last 8 months.
Meet Hadra, beautiful and courageous girl from Syria
Hadra is 11 years old. Imece met with her in one of the unofficial camps near Torbali, in Camönü, where she is quite new. Herself and her mother arrived only two months ago together with one sister and two brothers. They had to flee their home in the countryside very close to Aleppo after she lost her father in a bomb shelling. Yes, she and her siblings are orphans, due to this brutal, never ending war in Syria. Her mother, Amina, is sad & devastated most of the time but coping to stay strong thinking about the future of her children. She is providing for her children, and recently joined other Syrian refugees working in the farm-fields for a very limited salary.
Hadra has two more sisters which are older than her. They are married and still live in Syria, one in Damascus and one near Aleppo. She misses her sisters, relatives very much and can not wait to go back home to be with them again. As much as she misses her home country, Hadra is rightfully worried about every family member that is still there. She misses her school very much. When she grows-up, Hadra wants to become a doctor because by becoming a doctor, she will be able to help sick and injured people of whom she has seen too many in her young life. She is grateful and content at the moment for the education that Imece provides !
As we stated in the beginning, we would like to dedicate this post to the real heros serving on the ground, Imece leaders, and volunteers who have been relentlessly helping refugees, putting a smile in children, playing with them, organizing children activities, supporting women going though the hardship to provide them a better life. Their work is beyond imaginable.
The education village is coming together with BTF's support
We look forward to supporting Imece further in their Education Village project, partnering with them to build a sustainable education & living model for all the refugees. We look forward to giving an update on that front soon in one of our upcoming reports. At least for now, we hope that we have been able to share the invaluable work these volunteers do, and the impact of our education kits.
We are grateful for GlobalGiving for connecting us to global supporters like YOU, we would like to thank our big community of supporters, donors, and program volunteers who enabled this partnership for our bridge. Our program is continuing, and we will continue to seek your help in funding new programs, your volunteerism to enable a better life for the Syrian refugee children.
Thank you from the bottom of our hearts!
Bridge to Turkiye Fund.
Greetings from BTF,
We are excited to share some major developments in this update. If you recall, back in August 2016, we gave you heads-up about our sponsorship to produce and distribute Arabic pre-school education kits for Syrian refugee children. Due to the political environment in Turkey, and the adverse impact it has created on the local NGO's, we had to delay this project & the execution plans with the local partners. This past month in April, we started rolling-out this education kit for the refugee preschool children.
Just to calibrate ourselves on the population, over 3 million refugees live in Turkey, about half of this population is children, and vast majority of the children have been out of school for at least 5+ years. Although the migrant refugee population has found a new exile home, still over 40% of school-age children—or 380,000 child refugees—are still missing out on an education in Turkey according to a report published by UNICEF in January 2017. Barriers such as economic hardship, child labor, enrollment requirements, language difficulties, and a lack of affordable transportation keep them out of the classrooms.
Education is our focus, and has always been as it is the major gap and opportunity for the majority of the refugee children living in Turkey. Getting Ready for School” is an Arabic education kit composed of 4 activity based learning books, 1 puzzle, and 1 story book– all age appropriate education materials preparing little minds to the elementary school. We collaborated with Assoc. Prof. Dr. Selcuk Sirin from New York University who is specialized in Developmental Psychology with extensive research and field work focused on the refugee children in Turkey. He has originally developed this kit for the Turkish children 3 years ago and reached out to us to collaborate and find a way to bridge the benefits for the disadvantaged refugee children.
What is in it in the set for the refugee children?
The preschool education kit aims to develop 4 basic skills for the pre-school children. Visual skills, hearing skills, problem solving and motor skills and the education kit is set-up such that children will be able to complete individual activity sections anywhere at their pace, acquire keys at the end of sections, and solve the puzzle at the end, and the book will serve as a reward to finish the learning journey. We also added supplemental basic stationary tools so the kids can use them in related activities and can carry in a bag wherever they go. What we like about this education set is that it is a milestone driven, activity based learning, and will encourage child-parent or child-teacher interaction during the learning process.
The education part of the set includes:
Our total investment for this project is $35,000 which included translation services, design, print set-up, production, distribution, and all other additional stationary supply costs associated with the package. As we were working on the set formation, we wanted to make sure we also find strong field partners who can deliver these kits effectively, and integrate it as a tool in their existing curriculum targeting preschool aged kids. Yuva Association, Citizens Assembly (Yurttaslik Dernegi- previously known as Helsinki Yurttaslar Dernegi), and Imece Initiative based in Cesme/Izmir are our selected key partners for the pilot or initial phase. You can view their information at the table below. These NGOs provide year-long educational programs to the targeted children in their community centers. They have Syrian & Turkish educators, and volunteers who can guide little children and provide a fun and playful approach to learning in the absence of their parents.
In a few months, we will be hearing the real feedback from the children, and educators, and learn how best way to deploy these kits to increase its targeted reach and impact. The very first feedback we received from program coordinators is very positive; the teachers have found these kits to be very effective serving them well as a tool in the classrooms. We have capacity to distribute 3,000 more kits in the next few months, bringing our total deployment to total 5,000 kits at the end of the pilot period. We are curious to find out how the preschool children will react, what they like the most about the set, and what they would like to see more of so we can incorporate learnings into our education offerings in the future.
Thank You again for your strong support for our educational programs for the Syrian Refugee Children. With your continious support since Nov 2015, you are enabling these unique projects for them to achieve a better life and integrating them into a new society. Thank you for your trust and choosing us as your bridge to Syrian refugee children. We would also like to thank Global Giving as our key global partner in increasing our presence and connecting us to global donors just like you....
Bridge to Turkiye Fund
Greetings from BTF,
We are entering a new year full of hopes, having finished an impactful year in 2016, we feel privileged to have such strong supporters like you throughout the year, and enabled us the means to deliver 6 programs (shared in our previous reports) investing in various education and enrichment programs for the refugee children, and their mothers.
As you all know, the political environment and global support is not better than last year, or the previous 5 yrs since the mass migrations began. Non-profit efforts like ours, and a single donation you make has never been more important in the place for humanity... What is the price of giving hope, improving the mood or happiness of a single refugee child? At the end of the day, what is left out of a child if there is no hope or any dream to dream about..
Today, we will talk about a program we supported in late October - early November in partnership with an organization called "World At Play" (WAP). Before we get into the details of the project, we would like to calibrate you all about the situation and the pschology of the targeted children we targeted for this program.
Based on UN statistics, Turkey hosts now over 3 million refugees of which 50% are children, and more than 80% of the refugees live outside the state owned - operated refugee camps. These offcamp refugees are distributed in major cities and in the eastern part of Turkey, in border cities. Majority of these children live on slums, in survival mode and they work on streets trying to make a buck or two without much empathy from the general public. They are truly marginalized, and lack any sustainbale support environment or any good development guidance like what a school or community education center can provide. Majority of the children are out of any formal school, or been that way for soo long. These are the children living on the streets that we are used to seeing in the most undesirable conditions.
We planned and created a play program to target these refugee communities in Izmir, the 3rd largest city in Turkey. Our project partner has 10+ yrs experience working in orphanages, street children, care homes and the children with behavioral problems in Balkans and Europe. The project volunteers worked for 12 days in Izmir and the surrounding areas of Foca, Torbali and Turgutlu, as well as in the city slums and through multiple sessions, reached and integrated close to 600 refugee children. The group leveraged another local partner volunteer organization to assist in logistics, and targeting of children groups, and neighboorhoods. Each day groups of children were gathered together to be part of adult supervised play and craft activities. The number attending each session was unpredictable, anything between 25 and 100. Great adaptability was required and a wide range of games were prepared and delivered. It was rare that a child walked away from the sessions. It was great to see that children smiled, they laughed, and they showed us their positivism, humor, silliness against all the odds, and what they have been going though in their childhood. We truly felt that the refugee children and their parents appreciated this kind of care and affection. Pure play gave them the opportunity to be a child again even for a short time. Maybe for the first time in several years they had fun because of the project activities.
Probably not, but we want to thank you for supporting us in enabling this project and various other education and enrichment programs in the last year. Simply, we want to thank you not turning a blind eye on these children. Please take a look at the pictures below. We are grateful to GlobalGiving as being our non-profit partner to expose and promote our work, connecting us to a group of passionate supporters like you. We are continuing to invest in new programs in 2017 and in the children's future. We have 2 projects in our pipeline that are yet to launch, and look forward to sharing these further with you in the coming months.
Thank You from the bottom of our hearts!
Links:
Greetings from BTF,
Hope you are following us in different platforms, and seeing our continued focus on helping Syrian refugee children, the mission we took on since November 2015.
Overall, this summer has been a challenging environment for NGO’s operating in Turkey especially when it comes to supporting or funding new projects for the refugees. We have been able to develop new projects and nurture existing partnerships with local NGO's and continued our support for children & their families in different programs.
Recently, we have funded a new project called “ Women’s Knitting Cooperative” in partnership with Small Projects Istanbul (SPI), one of our project partners in October. Those of you following us from last year know that we invested significantly on a group collective initiative where 20 refugee women came together and knitted winter goods, made money, and supported their own children and daily living expenses. We integrated these hand-made winter essential goods such as gloves, hats and scarf’s in our collection, and sent them in batches as part of our 4Kids programs to the rural schools that experince harsh weather conditions in Turkey. BTF have been operating these annual school & student aid programs such as Boots4Kids, Coats4Kids for over 10 years. This year we collaborated with SPI for an expansion of this project by integrating and supporting additional women with total number of 60 into this knitting initiative. We spent about $14,000 to fully cover the project expenses such as knitting materials, tools, shipping needs, and other overhead. By the end of the project, BTF will provide 1000 hats, 1000 gloves and 1000 scarfs to the children in need of these winter goods through the Syrian Women Knitting Collective.
This collective is more than the number of hats and gloves, it provides the best opportunity for women to connect, get local coaching and help for their social integration & health services needs. They seek help for their problems from the collective tutors and provide solutions and solidarity for each other. Some Syrian women in the program know how to knit, and some do not, but as they learn to knit - building a new skill, all together these women heal from their wounds, and increase their wellbeing to integrate to the social life & support their families. This is the major impact of this project, finding and providing them a safe and productive place where they speak and connect with each other.
In the photos below, you can see the most recent batch production pictures of these goods worn by their own children which we received last week. You can see children’s happines, these winter sets come in multiple colors. This collective project is expected to last for the next 5 months, and will conclude with the end of the winter-season in March…
On a side note, we have delays in distributing our pre-school education kit to refugee children. This was the project we mentioned in our last update in September, and please stay tuned. In the next update, we look forward to sharing more about this education project and a few more, and the impact our projects generate for families and the children…
Thank you again for providing support, financial resources for the Syrian refugee children & families, and helping them to build a better life. We are thankful for the Global Giving platfrom partnership in helping us reaching more supporters everyday.
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