Lend a Hand and Let's Grow Together

Dear donor,

This is the 10th year of our mentorship project and we have come a long way.We had started the pilot project with only 5 CYDD branches 10 years ago.We now have 60 of our branches taking part with well-organized project teams and 700 new students benefiting in a single year.

Until recently the mentor-menti pairings were all done by the CYDD headquarters project team. This year however, this responsibility was delegated to the project teams in the branches and all interviews and pairings were done locally under the supervision and coordination of the headquarters team. This is a great step in the capacity building of the project and reaching out to all branches where there are university scholarship students is now a realistic dream.

 A total of 15 mentor and menti trainings were done online in October totalling to 78 hours with a participation of 1077 mentor and menti candidates and 25 CYDD volunteer trainers. Some branches started face-to-face mentor and menti trainings but the majority of meetings are still done on-line.

Starting in January various educational seminars will be available to menti students and supervision meetings will be held with mentors.

Thank you for being with us all these years..

Gratefully yours,

Links:

• mentorship project

Dear donor,

We are proud to announce that this year will be the 10th year of our Project!

Our Project is now well known among CYDD branches and university scholarship students and this year 55 branches will be participating with 800 students. So far we have reached some 2000 students and the Project capacity is now increasing geometrically.

During the summer months, our Project team held meetings with various corporations to provide mentors and resource support to the Project. Protocols were made with Henkel, Unifree, Apsiyon Software and Impact 2030 Initiative (among whose founding partners there are many forward-thinking companies such as IBM, Google, UPS, Pfizer and many others).. Collaborations were also made with various organizations to provide training to mentees during our 10th year. Seminars will thus be organized with Akbank Academy, YetGen MEF University and General Electric during the new school year.

We would like to take this opportunity to thank our donors who believed in our Project from the start and keep supporting our students..

Kind regards,

Links:

• Project website (in turkish)

Dear donor,

The pandemic changed the course of our program but at the same time enabled us to use this period of on-line meetings creatively.

The 9th year program is now enriched by monthly on-line seminars for all mentis, mentors and branch coordinators. January seminar by CYDD board member Tijen Mergen was about “Art of Being Content”. In February, professional coach Gökçe Pnar talked about the “Wheel of Life”. March talk by Ufuk Tarhan was about “the Future of the Future”. April seminar was by Prof. Dr. Erhan Erkut and he talked about “Career Plans and 21st Century Competencies”.Monthly seminars will continue till end june.

In the meantime, we introduce our Project to companies and organizations that will encourage their employees to be mentors in our 10th year program. We also hold internal meetings with the Cydd branches and Cydd youth facilitators to increase the number of Cydd branches to take part in the Project.

Some menti and mentors that live in the same town started their meetings outdoors whenever weather permits- keeping the necessary social distance. Even though we all feel the pressure of the ongoing pandemic, at times it feels good to be able to act as if we were back to the old normal!

We hope to have  our 10th year meetings live again..

Kind regards,

Dear donor,

In our 9th year we continue our mentoring project on-line but it has not lost its momentum.

We now have 422 mentor and mentii pairs from 34 different CYDD branches (17 in Istanbul and 17 in different towns) and 20 mentors who volunteered from abroad.

We have started the year with 8 mentor trainings each lasting 3 hours and 6 menti trainings each for 2 hours; all given on line by volunteer trainers.

The mentor and mentis have already met twice on line following their regular program.

Various seminars and educational trainings for mentiis that were done in small groups for each branch in the past will now be done on-line for all mentiis from all branches and we hope for favorable interactions and feedbacks.

As we go on-line we invest more on technology and look forward to your support..

Kind regards,

Links:

• Project website (in turkish)

Dear Donor,

Since our latest report not much has changed as far as Covid-19 restrictions on all educational institutions are concerned and there is no specific timeline to return to normal face-to-face education.

This also applies to our mentor and mentii meetings which will probably be held on line at least for the first school term. As most university students have returned to their hometowns in March continuing their distant education, regular mentor and meeting were also done online since then.In some cases,to connect with their mentors from their small viilages with poor wi-fi connections was a challenge for some students, but it helped them to dream and plan about their future.

In the meantime we started using the "mentornity" platform to facilitate our digital mentoring. One of our goals in our 9th year is to organize trainings for the participating CYDD branches on how to use this platform efficiently.

Our 8th year program was finalized officially on June 30th . We  came near to our goal of having 70% girl mentiis every year. Our 8th year project participants were 257 female students (122 from Istanbul region) and 126 male students (57 from Istanbul).

We have also successfully finished our pilot program for mentors from abroad with 8 pairings. Mentor trainings were done on-line for 2-3 hours with our trainer before the digital meetings began. 

The mentor and mentii applications for our 9th year will be over by the time this report reaches you and mentor and mentii matchings will be ready by our next report.

Thanks for supporting us..

Gratefully yours,

Links:

• Project website (in turkish)