Mentorship 360
Mentorship 360 was a program supported by various sponsors in which young and professional women members engaged in interactive mentoring in a closed roundtable platform. This platform created a 360 mentorship dynamic along with unique networking opportunities. Entry was competitive for young members (seniors and recent graduates) and by invitation for professional members.
The program included at least one high-level public event biannually. These events incorporated a range of leading Turkish women from the public, private, or non-governmental sectors along with other domestic and international leaders to address pressing contemporary issues for women in the Turkish workforce. These issues ranged from individual challenges to larger social concerns such as the issue of women's employment in the informal sector.
The program offered members several closed workshops based on focused training and targeted mentoring.
The program planned to host an open Turkish women's entrepreneurial event that would bring together a variety of Turkish women entrepreneurs to share their stories and recommendations through short presentations and an open Q&A.
Finally, the topics covered in the closed member roundtables and the open events were used to inform the creation of unique educational materials. These materials, designed in Turkish and/or English depending upon topic and format, were available to the public through the program's online platform.
Speak Out
The LGBT community in Turkey is hidden, discriminated and refused from the public sphere leading to a widespread ignorance and prejudices (WVS Database). Research indicates that 50% of university students and graduates living in Ankara and Istanbul show high level of homophobia and that high levels of homophobia are related with low levels of knowledge of LGBT individuals (Şah 2012). Therefore the Kadir Has Gender and Women’s Studies Research Center decided to ask the support of the Dutch Consulate Human Rights Funds to create the project “Speak-Out LGBTI Stories”.
With this project we will create a tool to raise LGBT visibility among students, particularly at KHAS. The project aims to create an interactive web platform as a tool for providing a forum for LGBTI individuals to define themselves and share their experience of being an LGBTI person in Turkey. The project will be an opportunity for LGBTIs to express and identify themselves. It will also provide the audience with first-hand knowledge and provoke its critical thinking. The stories will be accessible through an interactive internet platform, where video and audio files could be seen, heard, and also uploaded. These stories will work to raise awareness on LGBT rights in Turkey among students from Istanbul based universities by the end of the academic year 2015-2016.