Let's be United!

My name is Ekin Berk Polat. I am a 22 years old university student and activist in Turkey who is passionate about creating social impact on refugee protection and conflict resolution. I love travelling, getting introduced of different cultures and volunteering. I am the co-founder of Let’s be United project and the co-coordinator of a student organization called KU Global Aid where my team and I work on the adaptation problem of Syrian refugees since 2018. I have leadership experience for last 3 years in different organizations where I worked with a range of children and adults. I participated at various fully-funded international learning expeditions including Hong Kong, China, and Spain where I designed new projects to create better environments for locals. My vision for social change for a more peaceful future relies on respect and coexistence and I want to spread it all over the world starting from Turkey. 

We witnessed conflicts between Turkish and Syrian people that ended up with hostility towards one another and extreme polarization of the population. Our project tackles the adaptation problem of Syrian refugees and aims to battle with it starting with children, and including their parents. With our project, students and our volunteers were gathering fortnightly for 7 weeks to conduct our workshops that based on extracurricular activities such as art, rhythm, drama, and different game methods. With this project, it is aimed to provide social cohesion among children and their parents to strengthen communication between them and to support their personal development. We elevate humanity by transforming the polarizing atmosphere and creating a social construct for all displaced communities so that they have places that they can truly call their home without experiencing any conflicts with locals. Project will strengthen entirety of communities that will fight against all kinds of discrimination.

There is an adaptation and conflict problems of Syrian refugees with Turkish people. The tension increases and people become much more discriminated by the locals. We aim to improve the environment with a sense of unity for different ethnic groups and the local citizens. Both Refugee Crisis and discrimination are global issues that needs to be solved. According to UNHCR statistics, with 4 million refugees, Turkey is home to the world’s largest refugee population, with over 3.6 million Syrian refugees and close to 400,000 refugees and asylum seekers of other nationalities. Over 98 per cent of refugees in Turkey live in urban, peri-urban and rural areas. Close to 1.4 million refugees in Turkey are under 15 years old, and over 800,000 are aged between 15 and 24. Globally, 70.8 million individuals have been forcibly displaced worldwide because of persecution, conflict, violence, or human rights violations. Every minute, an estimated 20 people are forcibly displaced due to conflict, persecution, or war. Compounding the numerous risks and threats that refugees face are growing anti-refugee and anti-migrant sentiment, discrimination, and violence, which have profound implications for refugees’ social welfare and healthcare entitlements as they migrate to and settle in new host communities.

In the project, students and our members gather fortnightly for 7 weeks to conduct our workshops that based on extracurricular activities such as art, rhythm, drama, and different game methods. Project aims to provide social cohesion among children, to strengthen communication between them and to support their personal development. We aim for the improvement of communication among students, to increase student cooperation in school, developing social-emotional skills such as self-confidence, self-control, effective communication, problem solving, empathy, reconciliation, adaptation to the dynamics of the changing world in project participants. Our workshops are not costly, the key element is the determination and motivation of volunteers. This project aims to spread this social unity and harmony environment to all schools by starting to be a pilot in Istanbul and spreading to more schools in the following years and addressing more children in the long term. Now, we are getting ready to spread our project all over Turkey and the first step was Gaziantep, which is a southern province of Turkey at the border, which has an immense refugee population. The project also plans to include teachers and parents so that they can contribute to the sustainability of the project in the future.

Many Syrian refugees hailing from Syria reside in the Fatih municipality of Istanbul, a newly forming Arab enclave for refugees in the historical peninsula of the city. We started to conduct our project there. Many Syrian refugees occupy rooms in flats or rundown buildings lacking electricity or running water. Fatih has become a permanent and semi-permanent home to passing refugees and a well-known immigrant district of the city. A Syrian hub sprawling with Syrian eateries, bakeries, tourism offices, international shipping companies, real-estate agencies etc. There are many children who are enrolled Turkish schools, yet they are still facing discrimination by their peers. We have a partnership with an NGO that helped us with the arrangements with the school where we conducted our workshops. They also help us to engage with the community and our partnership became much stronger as we help each other. We attend their activities and they also participated in our workshops several times to spent some time with refugees. We gathered with the families of the children before conducting the project and started a communication with them. We have been interacting and working with the community since 2018 and will continue to engage more in the future. 

As Koç University Global Aid members, we wanted to design a project for Syrian Refugee children in Turkey as there was a big crisis. We knew that we should come up with a project that actually solves the problem of their community. In this regard, we started to conduct a literature review to collect information about the refugee children in various contexts. Together with the investigation, we also engaged with a local NGO based in Fatih where most of the refugee population live in İstanbul. We attend homework clubs with Syrian children. We realized that they could speak Turkish for daily communications but have difficulties with school tasks. We interviewed with them and collected information about their school life. Later, we realized that there is a communication problem between Syrian and Turkish children as they do not engage due to polarization caused by their families as well as their own feelings. In fact, the whole district was polarized. They were neighbors who did not talk and classmates who rarely played together. Later on, we decided to come up with a solution to that problem via conducting extracurricular activities and workshops to create a better environment to socialize for them.

My vision for social change and international cooperation for a more peaceful world relies on respect and coexistence, and I want to spread it all over the world. Entirety of the community should fight against all kinds of discrimination such as sexism, xenophobia, homophobia, etc. I believe such a social construct would result in people living harmoniously with each other in a prosperous community and can prevent conflicts. Today we are talking about Syrian refugees but tomorrow it can be a totally different community that flee to other countries due to persecution, violence, war and conflict. In this atmosphere I am questioning how we are handling with this entire issue of mobility in our lives. These people went through various challenges so we must not put the faces and stories behind the numbers. In this regard, I am passionate about creating better environments for all displaced communities so that they have places that they can truly call their home without experiencing any conflict.

Since the beginning of my university life, I have participated in several voluntary activities and organizations and eventually become the leader of those project team. I take an active role and led the projects, organize meetings, design workshops and coordinate our committee members. I am currently the general coordinator of a student organization called Koç University Global Aid. Our purpose as KU Global Aid is to support the development process of the world with global, humanitarian and need-oriented perspectives. In accordance with the needs of our time, we face complex and interrelated problems. My greatest motivation is making a social impact and solving these problems by considering sustainable and human-oriented designs based on social entrepreneurship. We organize international assistance projects every year within this framework. Over the last 6 years, we had projects carried out successfully in Tunisia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, India, Zimbabwe, and Brasilia. Recently we work on refugee crisis and focus on social cohesion of Turkish and non-Turkish children in middle schools. Being the leader of this important organization contributed a lot to me and eventually these experiences started to change me. In recent years, my responsibilities increased significantly in relation to my leadership positions in various organizations. I think the competences that I have expanded during my previous experiences and activities on conflict resolution both in academia and in the field will help me. Hence, I would like to say that I believe in myself to be well- equipped for such a task to solve the problem

I overcame many organizational challenges with my team and relevant authorities to obtain permission. Last semester, at a time when our team was so pessimistic about spreading our project because of the permission obstacles, I searched so hard to find new opportunities to spread our project all over Turkey. When there was no money beside limited university budget and cooperation with any NGO, I initiated an application process to find money from different companies. At the end, we won a competition and received 2.000 USD as a catalyst fund to spread our project to another city. When we are doing all these, I also led our team to do productive things and we revise the project content for the next projects. It was a very beneficial step because it allowed us to redesign the problematic parts of our project based on our previous experiences.

Recently, my responsibilities increased significantly in relation to my leadership positions in various organizations. Last year I found myself in a position where I was struggling to balance my works, academic responsibilities, and my personal relations. I am a person of his word and never dodge my responsibilities. If I take an initiative, I put all my effort making it successful. However, I realized that while trying to balance all these, I neglected my own well-being and self-development. Consequently, I immediately questioned myself and my life and realized that the root causes of many problems can be associated with my own being. Consequently, I decided to take care of myself and try to adapt some meditation practices and mindfulness activities to my own life to be a better human being as well as a leader to my community. We are all human beings before all else and our mood and well-being directly affect our leadership. I realized that without being physically and mentally healthy, it is hard for us to contribute positively for the impact that we are determined to create. I also observed the same problem with my other teammates and encourage all of them to do the same.

Koç University Global Aid is a student organization under the Koç University’s Office of International Program. The university and the Office supports us in terms of limited funding opportunities and expertise. 

Whereas almost all the projects or NGOs in Turkey and worldwide focus on the needs of Syrian refugees in terms employability, living standards and health issues, we are very innovative as we are not only working with Syrian refugees but also with the locals in a very comprehensive level. Our project includes students, parents and teachers and aim to sustain social cohesion with them by using art and human values. Therefore, we are approaching the problem from a completely differed angle and our solution designed to be very effective as we always measure our social impact with various forms and methods.

I am very proud to reach over 150 children and their families in two different cities since 2019. In one year, with the momentum we have right now, we aim to spread our Project to 5 more cities and aiming to reach 1200 students, parents and teachers in total. By the end of 5 years, we aim to spread the Project all over Turkey with more than 100.000 beneficiaries. 

As I have stated before, we aim to spread our Project all over Turkey with the cooperation of universities and ministry of education. With the Project, we will elevate the Syrian refugees and Turkish people in terms of building a more peaceful country. In the long term, I strongly believe that our Project should be applied in every country which face problems regarding social cohesion and discrimination. It has a potential to be applied in Turkey as well as the whole world so that 70 million refugees can feel supported and belonged.

Partnered with some offices of ministry of education and with a local NGO named Small Projects Istanbul for Syrian Refugees. 

Still in progress

We got funding from different companies and our university. It was around 2 thousand USD per year.