The Knitting For Hope Social Initiative was launched on 20 December 2020 by university, graduate and doctoral students living in Şanlıurfa. The idea of the project sprouted with the training they received within the scope of the Erasmus+ project “Inclusion of Refugee Youth through Social Entrepreneurship”, in which the members of the team participated together. With the entrepreneurial ideas developed during the trainings, the young people asked, “How can we provide social benefit in the society?” they began their work. Thus, they set out with the aim of getting to know each other better between the local people and the immigrant people, producing new things together and contributing to social cohesion at the same time. Later, while thinking about how immigrant and local women can be employed in their homes and how they can achieve social harmony together, they focused on the idea of designing and producing amigurumi toys, macrame bags, key chains, bookends and bookcase accessories. They started to work with the idea of social entrepreneurship, which will both create an economic area of employment for women and provide positive interaction in the process of adaptation to living together. In line with this idea, they set out with migrant women, whom they had met through various projects before. The amigurumi toys produced meet their buyers both at home and abroad.
In order to talk about the activities carried out within the scope of the ‘Knitting For Hope’ social initiative, one of the outputs of the Erasmus+ project, Involving Youth Asylum Seekers through Social Entrepreneurship, Gökçe Ok, Deputy Director General of Migration Management, Aydın Keskin Kadıoğlu, Head of Integration and Communication Department, and Fatih Işık, Director of Şanlıurfa Provincial Migration Management. we got together.
Aydin Keskin KADIOGLU:
During the contacts we made within the scope of SIRSE in Şanlıurfa, we saw the “solidarity” state of social cohesion. Within the scope of the Knitting For Hope social initiative, which was established by the young people participating in our project, “women are knitting their future with hope!”
Hakan GULERCE:
Endless thanks to Gökçe Ok, Aydın Keskin Kadıoğlu, and Fatih Işık, who accepted our invitation and came to our city for a day by enduring the troubles and meeting with the Knitting For Hope project team, which is an output of the Inclusion of Refugee Youth Through Social Entrepreneurship (SIRSE) training, encouraging and supporting us.
