Support Play and Peace Advocacy in Turkey
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We are a bunch of people working on young people’s rights, play and peace advocacy.
Focusing on the child-led play, we have created the civil initiative of “Oyna Yap Boz” in 2018, with the efforts of two volunteers who were willing to work on young people’s rights, libertarian pedagogies, and play advocacy. Since then we have carried out research, translated texts, done interviews, and organized many pop-up play events all on a voluntary basis.
We have volunteered in play workshops which were run by Tarlabaşı Community Center in Istanbul and we had the opportunity to observe how play affects young children who have experienced difficult situations or trauma created by forced migration.
We have taken part in the organization of the International Symposium for Alternative Education in May 2019. The same year we got involved in the Playworker Development Course by Pop-Up Adventure Play which focuses on child-led play and we started to organize child-led play events. We created play spaces in four different cities.
Now our team has grown and included more people from different backgrounds who support the right to play, for all children. And since the beginning of 2021, we have been working on a project called “Child and Peace Research”.
Considering the war-stricken regions in the eastern parts of Turkey and the neighboring countries and the forced migration rates, more and more children are experiencing post-war traumas in Turkey; violence, and oppression become a vicious circle in their daily lives. Research on play and historical experiences such as the Adventure Playgrounds in the UK after World War II suggests that play and wellbeing are strongly correlated. By focusing on free play’s role in children’s perception of peace, we believe that it is possible to find new and different ways of helping and supporting these children and their communities.
We aim to develop an approach that enables the healing power of play in peacebuilding processes. Although there are many non-governmental organizations that focus on children’s rights in Turkey, there is no organization that directly focuses on childrens’ relationships with peace, and the healing power of play in this relationship. We have set off on this road and rented a space in order to organize workshops and play sessions, but unfortunately, due to the conditions of the pandemic, we didn’t have many chances to achieve these.
Still, we aim to keep our space open and keep going so that we might have the chance to help more children in our local community.
We aim to create resources on tracking and determining the outspread violence in daily life, which was created through war or other forms of violence; along with the resources on the healing processes of the traumas which were created by these forms of violence.
We aim to create intersections between child and peace fields, to collaborate with the local and international institutions working on these fields, to create resources that can help children to restore their relationships with their environment and within themselves through peaceful methods, and we aim to carry out peace activities with children, in line with these resources.
We believe that values such as tolerance, inclusiveness, happiness, equal rights and respect, can easily flourish through play and these values and concepts also support the child’s wellbeing and perception of peace.
We believe that all of us are capable of creating peaceful relationships with one another, taking care of one another, and growing and flourishing while helping others.
We hope you can give us a hand to get closer to our goals and to keep on walking on our path, to create new experiences, and to perform non-violent and peaceful studies for children and with children.
We are aware of the fact that there is too much to be done.
Yet we know that we are not alone on this road.
Because “There is no way to peace, peace is the way”
Do you want to walk on this road with us?
You can follow and contact us on social media:
https://www.instagram.com/cocukvebaris/
https://twitter.com/cocukvebaris
https://www.facebook.com/cocukvebaris
Focusing on the child-led play, we have created the civil initiative of “Oyna Yap Boz” in 2018, with the efforts of two volunteers who were willing to work on young people’s rights, libertarian pedagogies, and play advocacy. Since then we have carried out research, translated texts, done interviews, and organized many pop-up play events all on a voluntary basis.
We have volunteered in play workshops which were run by Tarlabaşı Community Center in Istanbul and we had the opportunity to observe how play affects young children who have experienced difficult situations or trauma created by forced migration.
We have taken part in the organization of the International Symposium for Alternative Education in May 2019. The same year we got involved in the Playworker Development Course by Pop-Up Adventure Play which focuses on child-led play and we started to organize child-led play events. We created play spaces in four different cities.
Now our team has grown and included more people from different backgrounds who support the right to play, for all children. And since the beginning of 2021, we have been working on a project called “Child and Peace Research”.
Considering the war-stricken regions in the eastern parts of Turkey and the neighboring countries and the forced migration rates, more and more children are experiencing post-war traumas in Turkey; violence, and oppression become a vicious circle in their daily lives. Research on play and historical experiences such as the Adventure Playgrounds in the UK after World War II suggests that play and wellbeing are strongly correlated. By focusing on free play’s role in children’s perception of peace, we believe that it is possible to find new and different ways of helping and supporting these children and their communities.
We aim to develop an approach that enables the healing power of play in peacebuilding processes. Although there are many non-governmental organizations that focus on children’s rights in Turkey, there is no organization that directly focuses on childrens’ relationships with peace, and the healing power of play in this relationship. We have set off on this road and rented a space in order to organize workshops and play sessions, but unfortunately, due to the conditions of the pandemic, we didn’t have many chances to achieve these.
Still, we aim to keep our space open and keep going so that we might have the chance to help more children in our local community.
We aim to create resources on tracking and determining the outspread violence in daily life, which was created through war or other forms of violence; along with the resources on the healing processes of the traumas which were created by these forms of violence.
We aim to create intersections between child and peace fields, to collaborate with the local and international institutions working on these fields, to create resources that can help children to restore their relationships with their environment and within themselves through peaceful methods, and we aim to carry out peace activities with children, in line with these resources.
We believe that values such as tolerance, inclusiveness, happiness, equal rights and respect, can easily flourish through play and these values and concepts also support the child’s wellbeing and perception of peace.
We believe that all of us are capable of creating peaceful relationships with one another, taking care of one another, and growing and flourishing while helping others.
We hope you can give us a hand to get closer to our goals and to keep on walking on our path, to create new experiences, and to perform non-violent and peaceful studies for children and with children.
We are aware of the fact that there is too much to be done.
Yet we know that we are not alone on this road.
Because “There is no way to peace, peace is the way”
Do you want to walk on this road with us?
You can follow and contact us on social media:
https://www.instagram.com/cocukvebaris/
https://twitter.com/cocukvebaris
https://www.facebook.com/cocukvebaris
Organizer
Emre Gündüz
Organizer
Münster, Nordrhein-Westfalen