Education Projects
It is really a difficult journey to struggle for animal welfare in Turkey. You have to fight with the prejudices, traditions and superstitions about animals. You have to begin by telling that animals are sensitive living beings with the capacity of feeling pain. During our 10 years of struggle to create awareness, we realized how hard it is to change the grown ups' mentality towards animals, and decided to make an investment for the future and started the education project.
We started by translating to Turkish, the education book that Robert Smith had published for his education project in Romania. The book was prepared by a committee of teachers and delegates from international animal protection organizations. We had full confidence that the content was pedagogically correct and adequate for our mission of animal welfare.
Two animal protection organizations in Netherlands, Wereldpootjes and ActieZwerfhonden kindly accepted to sponsor the printing of the booklet. WE are grateful to them for this support.
In 2008, we reached 10.000 students in Istanbul. We visited all education parks of Turkish Education Volunteers Foundation- TEGV- in Istanbul. We also cooperated with Sabanci University students, in the social responsibility project they made and gave our seminar in schools that they worked with.
In all the schools we go, after each seminar, we give each attendant an education booklet as a gift and in some schools we also present them with T-Shirts on the back of the which it writes "Please don't turn your back on animals" in three languages.
In 2009 and 2010 we gave seminars in many other schools in Istanbul and also in other cities like Bursa, Diyerbakır, Izmit, Bitlis.
The education project relieved us from the disappointments we have faced in the other fronts of the struggle for the welfare of animals and gave us hope for the future.
