Gender Equality Turkey Project #44260

Syrian Women's Workshop for Self-Reliance

by Support to Life (STL) Hayata Destek Dernegi

Project Report | Sep 10, 2020
We come together with food

By Ekin Calici Kiyak | Research Officer

The world becomes more and more challenging and darksome with the pandemic. As Support to Life, we always try to find ways to come together and overcome the difficulties. This time, we are representing to you our graduates from the food production courses.

3.6 million Syrians living in Turkey, face the risk of losing their jobs, failing to satisfy the basic needs and violations of human rights. To create a new livelihood opportunity and support women empowerment, we started a new educational activity in the Culture Center for women in Altnözü. Refugee women received food production courses along with Turkish women contributing a more colorful and rich joint culture at the same time.

Women came together thanks to food and enjoyed producing with each other. The training was on foods that can be sold in markets like delicious marmalade or foods that are common and popular in Turkish cuisine. The training enabled women from local and refugee communities to socialize, and was based on a community-based approach that puts the emphasis on skills building as well as knowledge-exchange. 21 Syrian and 10 Turkish women, will be receiving completion certificates from the Public Education Centre.

For building a better future together, we support life by empowering women. We seek to help refugees resume their self-reliant, independent lives as individuals. With your help we can reach out to more women and create a new path to walk on altogether.

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May 14, 2020
A New Way to Support Life

By Ekin Calici Kiyak | Research Officer

As Support to Life, we always explore all the possibilities and try to find new ways to support life. This time we developed a new creative and cooperative way to support life and women’s empowerment and lead the way for those who want to become supporters.

We created an alternative that transforms shopping experience into a chance to support a more fair and equal world with a shopping point that contributes to more than one Sustainable Development Goals by producing and consuming responsibly and inviting others to do so. We formed a social design market servicing to this fin.

We completed our works on brand creation and marketing and now we are proud to say that we are officially open to become, find and aid supporters. We created ‘Destekar’ - which means ‘supporter’ in Turkish - brand whose activities overlap with Support to Life serving the same goals, worrying about the same problems.

We created a series of collections and one of our first collections is inspired by Göbeklitepe. With the Göbeklitepe Home Textile Collection we tried to maintain Göbeklitepe’s inclusive spirit that shows us working, worshipping and creating together is one of the best ways to support life.

To produce responsibly we started from the design process. We gathered a team of designers who work with natural materials to imitate the nature of the world and who pursue what is precious in art and in daily life. In our designs, we departed from the Göbeklitepe’s guardian shapes and patterns. During the production process, we worked with a team consisting of 10 women who live in Sanlurfa feeling the spirit of Göbeklitepe. We enjoyed working and producing together while empowering women and girls by including them in all parts of the production in their unique ways. In this way, we created pillowcases and lace pillows to enjoy at home together in peace and table mats to eat together remembering inclusiveness and unity.

By doing so we opened a new path to support life and women’s empowerment and to become supporters by simply shopping from our brand.

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