ESC: Active Villagers With Volunteers

Our association was established in 2010 in Sakarya as a Youth and Sports Association by volunteer teachers. Our association, which was active in local activities until 2014, has started to focus on international studies after this date. Within this scope, international studies started with youth projects and progressed towards sports projects with the increasing capacity of our association. In this process, the number of volunteers has increased significantly. Initially, our volunteers consisted of high school and university students. After starting sports projects, our organization has become rich especially with coaches, teachers and academicians. Moreover, our association has been Eurodesk Turkey Contact Point in 2019. As members of the Association, we follow all national and international conferences on environment, climate and recycling. In this regard, we aim to produce not only awareness projects but also scientific projects and contribute to the awareness process going on. We all know about the commitments made by countries at the UN Climate Movement Summit in September 2019 on climate issues. We plan to work to move to a better spot as the commitment of civil society in Turkey. We also conduct cooperation negotiations with NGOs working on this issue. We participated in the 16th Istanbul Biennial Seminar about the theme “Seventh Continent’’ which was opened in September and November 2019. In October 2019, we implemented an environmental theme project titled ‘Touch, Change, Live…’’. Ekrem Yüce, the Mayor of Sakarya Metropolitan Municipality, participated in the Sapanca Lake cleaning event during the project and announced that he initiated an environmental movement with our project. This enabled us as an NGO to be involved in decision-making in the environment and climate processes. On the other hand, we accept the truth that obesity and inactivity are the biggest threats for humanity and main reasons for many illnesses. For this reason, we try to create an environment that encourages young people to do exercise and we want them to gain natural dietary habits. Every year we organize beach volleyball and beach soccer tournaments in cooperation with Karasu Municipality. Moreover, we help young people to avoid inactivity with hiking, traditional food days, village visits and awareness works, and we prevent the overuse of electronic devices that lead young people to many health problems. Our association is also active in amateur sports. We attend the International Euroijada Sports Games, which are attended by 20 countries every year. We have active teams in basketball, futsal and volleyball. In addition, our association has started to develop activities against hate speech and racism, especially in recent years. We emphasize the humanist perspective in all our projects. We aim to create social spaces for children and young people to keep them away from marginality. Some of the local activities we have done so far are to make a project on drug addiction, to design a street for children, to create a chess area in the park for young people and children to spend their time more effectively. In addition, Toy Festival, painting with street chalk for children, youth concerts and folk dance shows are some of our local events. SOME WORKS HAS BEEN DONE BY OUR ASSOCIATION IN THIS PROCESS: -Basketball course for children between aged 8 and 12, -Futsal team (active in international tournaments) -Bocce team, -Volleyball team (local) -Organization of beach sports in Karasu, -Traditional game sharing days, -Folk dances, -Concerts and street festivals -Trekking activities, -Food days to introduce traditional healthy meals, -Environmental cleaning activities, -Designing artistic products from waste materials, -Information on climate change, -Energy efficiency awareness studies, -Erasmus + and project writing seminars within the scope of Eurodesk, OBJECTİVES OF OUR ORGANİZATİON: -To guide young people to healthy diet alternatives and healthy living activities, -To develop alternatives to keep young people away from harmful habits, -To encourage the participation of young people in the decision-making processes, (We have cooperation with the governmental institutions in our province in this regard) -To develop behavior against hate speech among young people, -To conduct studies and guidance to enable young people to exercise regularly or to do sports actively, -To struggle against marginalization and prejudice in all areas, -To organize activities to make better the current situation in the field of environment, -To raise awareness about the size and expected consequences of climate change for everyone in our province, -To guide the talented children to art activities and to open courses.