Carried out under the partnership of Goethe Institute, Sultanbeyli Municipality and Solidarity for Refugees Association, with “Flying Library” Project we carried out direct regular programs with children – 138 Syrian,142 from the local community -and indirect activities with 882 children. Now, the mobile library is at its new station in Avcılar with the coordination of YUVA and District Governorship of Avcılar and partnership of Avcılar Muncipality.
Flying Library has become a meeting point for children from the local community and from Syria where they turn the time they spend outside into a quality time, enjoy learning through fun, discover their skills and empower the relations of solidarity and sharing between each other. In order to reach to the beneficiaries, we first introduced refugees and local people in Sultanbeyli with Flying Library through an opening event. We reinforced curiosity for the mobile library through home visits to local children and families, bilingual (Arabic and Turkish) brochures and street activities.
During the time it was located in Sultanbeyli, Flying Library has become a space where children read books and finish the end of the stories with a blend of their own imagination, where they ensconce themselves in cushions and watch movies with their cinema tickets, where they design ergonomic products out of the wastes around them and where they improve their creativity. Children became cookie monsters in the workshops they took part in and learned how to prepare their own foods, they became explorers with positive sciences and gave voice to the walls they discovered, they brought puppets together in their fingers and created stories. Along with the Turkish and Arabic literacy courses, Flying Library hosted many events where children sang together, danced step by step, learnt clowning and circus performance and had memories one more joyful than the other. In course of these workshops, methods that look out for the children’s psychological benefits and their learning needs have been used.
By favour of its experienced trainers and volunteers, Flying Library is now aiming to bring the safe and inclusionary learning spaces it has created for the children, youth and adults to its new house Avcılar.
What is Flying Library?
Flying Library is an alternative learning space that reaches over the districts that has limited or no access to public services via a mobile container, in order to support local children and youth to build a safe future for their own, Flying Library conducts projects that strengthen their life skills and based upon social cohesion.
Within this framework, Flying Library carried out its actions between January 2017 – August 2017 in Sultanbeyli, Istanbul with its social activity programs that are created in order to make access to schools easier for children and youth, to turn the time they spend outside into a quality time and to create safe and inclusionary spaces for children and youth. During this period, children in the age range of 7-14 and youth in the age range of 18-27 who are locals or Syrians with no or partially access to schools have been reached out.
13 different workshop projects have been designed under the Flying Library Activity Program during this 7 month period. These workshops have been planned in accordance with the needs and interests of children between the ages of 7-13 and conducted with addressing a different issue in each of them. Within the scope of Child and Youth Worker Training Program, volunteered youth between the ages of 18-27 has been reached. Through the program and workshops local and Syrian youth were brought together with children and opportunities for youth to become facilitators were created. By doing so, it was attempted to provide support for youth to develop themselves as engaging individuals in life.
As a result of these conducted activities, Flying Library has become a meeting point where children and youth can introduce their hopes and entertainment, where they can call it their “Second Home”, where they empower their friendship boundaries.
