How did the first 3 months of 2024 go in our Women’s Counselling Centre and Mentoring Project?

How did the first 3 months of 2024 go in our Women’s Counselling Centre and Mentoring Project?

Since the beginning of 2024, our project includes social cohesion activities to support the relationship between the local community and refugees. Within the scope of the project, there are also protection activities focusing on personal problems and issues. We also carry out activities to support the awareness of adults reached by our project on gender-based violence. We also provide mentoring support to the organisations we support within the framework of our areas of expertise.

In the first three months of the year, our project reached 618 people including women, men, and children.

In this context, we carried out case management work within the scope of the vulnerabilities experienced by 200 people, 117 of whom were women and 83 of whom were children, and carried out improvement works.

We made referrals in accordance with the demands of the beneficiaries in the case files. We provided 72 women with basic needs referrals including support such as food, clothing, and market cards. We provided 15 children with winter clothes and stationery. We provided legal support to 16 women through legal aid. The women who received legal support requested a lawyer to apply for a divorce case and to write petitions for various reasons, such as lack of registration. 17 women and 7 children accessed health services. For the education of 2 earthquake survivor children, we contacted the directorate of national education in their district and supported the enrolment of the children in school. We also provided individual psychological counselling support to 72 people, 41 children and 31 women. We held 124 psychological counselling sessions in total.

In 2024, our efforts to combat gender-based violence continued. We meet with men on Thursdays to discuss the situation of violence in Turkey. Women learn about the ways and mechanisms they can use when they are subjected to violence through our “Women Write Beautiful Stories” tool. In the works we carried out within the scope of the project, we identified that 56 people experienced different forms of gender-based violence and we carried out detailed studies by taking these people into case management.

We organised Turkish language classes for women. 28 women received their Turkish language certificates. 18 women successfully completed their courses at A1 beginner level and 10 women successfully completed their courses at A2 beginner 2 level. We also continue to work together with our volunteers. In this context, we organised two handicraft activities with our refugee and Turkish women friends.

In our institutional mentoring work, we started to work with two mentee civil society organisations working in different cities. We conducted a five-week training and support work titled “Protection” with these organisations.