Beraberce Association

Beraberce Foundation puts “social adaptation” issue studies in migration-related fields in its center. In this sense, strengthening and reproducing social adaptation opportunities, eliminating obstacles in front of the social adaptation, offering capacity developing support to the civil society organizations which are working on social adaptation field, organizing events about strengthening social awareness about social adaptation and also producing education modules and various materials for this issue creates general frame of the beraberce foundation’s works that are maintaining in the migration field. In this context, berabercefoundation’s have three different works that are still existing:

Festivals of Living Together: We think that not seeing prejudices, differences as a richness and generalizing approaches are important obstacles in front of the social adaptation processes’ strong and healthy way of progress. Based on this thought beraberce Foundation aims at revealing strengthening the interaction between individuals or communities which belong to different cultures, making intercultural communication possible, how different cultures that are sharing the same space undertake the concentrator function with its abstract examples by organizing Festivals of Living Together. With this perspective, we are organizing the “Festival of Living Together” for the purpose of rethinking the migrant communities’ relations with the city they live in and their neighbors in the living ground together. This festivals which are enriched by workshops and forums which are organized by ally institutions and individuals who are maintaining similar works based on living together thought with people’s concerts which their arts commit to our memory and movie screenings, at the same time they provide a space for migrant communities who are living in the city which they can share cultural values like art, literature, cuisine and their productions. With those festivals most importantly in İstanbul which high number of migrant communities are living in different counties, we are calling all the people who are living in the cities including migrant communities in a platform which can everybody has a right to speak to produce, share what they produced and solidarity; and invite them to reproduce the meal that we cooked in our kitchen, the melody that touches our hearts and the soul of togetherness in our dances.

Training Programme of Community Translators: Notion of migration is also bringing a series of vital needs with itself. Communication is one of the most important things among them. Immigrants need to communicate with the society that they came, from all kinds of levels. This need for communication in the case of not being able to communicate with a common language is provided by the help of a volunteer or a professional translator who works for an institution. We can see those translators in many critical points; from psychiatry clinics to psychologist sessions, from physical therapy to interviews with social services professionals, from meetings with the head of the school principals for school registrations to legal and juridical processes. Briefly, community translatorsfunction as a bridge of communication for either providing their needs, increasing their life qualities or run-up the social adaptation process for migrants. This situation in terms of the whole social adaptation process makes community translators’ qualities high and developing their capacities becomes very vital. With this educational program which its content prepared by BeraberceDerneği with the experiences of studies conducted in Community Translators field all around the world, it aims at people who works in this field are equipped basic information and skills which community translatorship requires, develop the translating skills of those people, provide them to learn professional ethics and apply them, develop mechanisms to solve problems by taking the frequently encountered problems into consideration and learning together with sharing the experiences that they gained.

Teacher Support Programme: Millions of millions of children who had to leave their countries because of war, battle or for other reasons, they left their houses, friends, schools, dreams, everything that they loved and have gotten used behind and had to start to live in a different country that they don’t know the language. Being a refugee or asylum-seeker means a hard life and life with an uncertain future. Besides traumas that are seen before, during and after the migration, refugee children encountered lots of negative factors in the country that they migrated into. Towards Syrian refugee schoolchildren’s that are under the Temporary Protection Regime in Turkey social integration, especially prohibit the discrimination that they are exposed in the schools and for the aim of lay the foundation of living together in the schools, with the Teacher Support Programme that is conducted since 2017 as an online or face-to-face; it aims at supporting class teachers, branch teachers, school counselors who have refugee children in their classrooms/schools in public primary schools, secondary schools or high-schools. Teacher Support Programme specifically focused on these themes: educational rights of refugee children, avert overarching education and discrimination, planning an educational/learning processes for students whose mother tongue is not Turkish, teaching in hard conditions, working with traumatizing children, democratic and participant classroom management, measuring migrant and refugee students achievements.