Representatives of the Turkish Red Crescent Bağcılar Community Center and the Association of Doomed People met with students of IGU

Emin Culfa, who works at the Turkish Red Crescent Bağcılar Community Center for four years talked about the aims of the center, the provided services and the target audience. The Red Crescent Community Centers were established to provide guidance, training services and psychosocial support for Syrian refugees under the Syrian Humanitarian Operation. Istanbul Bağcılar Community Center was established with the support of Turkish Red Crescent, International Federation of Red Cross (IFRC) and European Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid Operations (ECHO).

The target group of the center is primarily women and children affected by the war, adult Syrian men and people with special needs. Services are provided within the scope of programs such as social integration program, adaptation and livelihood program. Social activities, trips, employment applications, referral for temporary protection, social and psychological support, group work with children, Turkish language course, ensuring the participation of children in education are among the activities of the center. In addition to the permanent staff in the center, there are approximately 3200 volunteers involved in voluntary work. Some of the volunteers are intern students of the related departments of the universities. In this context, Culfa called our third grade students to become voluntary interns and stated that they can take part in activities such as language support, participation and observation of social activities organized for the target audience, participation and observation of professional practices, and working with refugee children. Culfa also stated that voluntary and intern students may be employed in the institution after their graduation and that three students currently work as permanent volunteers and interns in the institution.

17 students filled out the application forms at the end of the seminar after the presentation of Culfa who draws attention to the importance of volunteering for students to gain experience in the field of refugees and asylum seekers and to create a network for their professional lives while they were still students.

Secondly, Chairman of the Association of Doomed People Necdet Yüksel gave information about the association activities and the target audience of the association and he also called on the students for voluntary internship.

The Association of Doomed People, which has been in operation for twelve years, was established to provide support to them in overcoming the difficulties they faced, to improve the prisoners' self-sufficiency and to bring them into society particularly in the areas of clothing and education to have been providing services to the inmates and their relatives. Providing all these services through the letters sent by the convicted prisoners, the association determines the stated needs and serves to meet these needs on a voluntary basis. Around 100 letters a day are sent by 300 thousand people in 400 prisons in Turkey. The target audience of the Association is prisoners, university student inmates, prisoners who want to continue their education while in prison, and children who have been dragged into crime due to being with their families in prison, women inmates and children staying with their mother in prison, wife/husband, children and families of the inmates in need. In addition, there is penpal service which is used to contribute to the rehabilitation of prisoners in many developed countries of the world. Yüksel stated that the prisoners should be cared to get contributed to the society and called on the students to volunteer at the association.