Rising for Blind Children - Education4Blind

Greetings from Bridge To Turkiye Fund,

We have news from the field. As part of our education campaign, and the promise we gave to you all, we just started distributing the braille booksets to the 16 specialty schools in Turkey this past week. In the last 2 months, we have been busy coordinating the execution phase with our national partner "Federation of Disabled People" (Engellililer Federasyonu), which arranged the production process and the logistics for these schools located in different parts of Turkey.

This is an extensive campaign covering all the specialty education schools in Turkey, and we have been anxious to see the distribution and the impact & happiness we generate. We were curious about the following question: 

How would blind children receive, react and welcome the new braille books?

We received enormous appreciation for our gifts expressed by the school coordinators and the volunteer members of the partner organization. They are all grateful for our support and investment, and the children were very happy indeed to receive these books which they will be reading during the summer months. Our timing could not have been better. One small change we are making in the distribution strategy is the number of book-sets we send to each school.  We originally planned to send only 1 copy of the books-set to each school and allocate capacity for the other public schools where blind children attend, however, based on the feedback from the administrator's, one set would not be adequate, and we are providing 2 or 3 copies depending on the enrollment numbers.

So far, our project partner already shipped these sets to 9 schools. In a few weeks as the second production phase is completed, they will send additional sets to other 7 targeted schools, which will bring our total deployment to 16 schools, and 50 book-sets. Down below, we have the very first pictures taken from Canakkale Gelibolu Blind Children School, which is a school located in the Upper-West region of Turkey.

Thank you again for rising for Blind Children, providing them the books to increase literacy and helping them advance their knowledge in world literature. We invested a total of $8,000 for this braille book-set project. These children don't have means to buy these special and expensive books. If the school doesn't have a good library or have books for kids to borrow, the children don't practice and read braille well and have no or limited opportunity to enhance their literacy beyond their core subject area books. With this investment, they each can read 10 new books, will become better readers, and advance in school to higher grades to be able to seek a college degree. 

We look forward to giving more updates from the field in our next report, sharing more school and children pictures, and providing you more feedback from their teachers. We hope you feel strong about the impact you are making for the children and encouraged by what you have seen and read so far.

We want to Thank You again for your generous donations, and your trust in us. We would like to thank Global Giving as our global partner being the bridge between you and our organization and giving us the visibility about our projects and impact.

Bridge to Turkiye Fund

Greetings from BTF,

It has been almost 3 months since we launched our "Education4Blind" project seeking your support and donations. As you would remember, we kicked-off this special project during the last Giving Tuesday day to create a strong voice for the blind children. We would like to thank you again for your strong support that made us one of the Top 10 projects (in terms of total $ funds raised) out of a few hundred in the Global Giving platform.  

Our fundraising phase is still ongoing and we will continue to do so to meet our total investment goals in the next 2-3 months. 

We outlined 3 aid areas in our Education4Blind fund:

1. Providing college micro scholarships to blind youth - College students.
2. Gifting an English Language Learning Set to Braille Library (in-house production) + 2 English Story books.
3. Gifting Braille literature books for the 16 specialty schools where blind children attend.

We are happy to report that we completed the identification of our candidates in Middle East Technical University (#1 Public University in Ankara-Turkey) and we transferred the committed 1 yr scholarship funds for 5 blind students in December working directly with the University's Bursar Office. These scholarships are about $1000 in value for a single school year, and we are committed to provide this support till each of our supported students graduate with a degree. In our group of 5 students, we have 2 majoring in International Relations, 1 in Sociology, 1 in Psychology, and 1 in Physics. Our total committed funds for this program is currently valued at $25,000 (5 yrs, 5 students).

As for the second aid area, we are partnering with a local NGO - Braille Library in Izmir called "TURGOK" . This is going to be the first ever production of a language learning Braille set in Turkey. In the project development stages back in the summer, we have identified this gap and the fact that they haven't been able to find funding locally for it for years. We are happy to invest in this special project with your strong support. Thank you for your donations again. The project team selected “Essential Grammar in Use” by Raymond Murphy (319 pages) as the original set/source to translate into Braille production. We will gift 4 total sets of valued at $4000 which will be printed in 10 sections with cover to increase the utilization. The team will also work on the production of 2 English story books to complement language learning as part of the gift set.

The last funding area is the production of Braille literature book sets for each of the specialty schools in Turkey. This is an undertaking we did with all the principals of these schools, as they indicated the lack of Braille books as the #1 need to boost Braille literacy for their students. We partnered with another NGO operating in Ankara- who serves the blind population in large to print, distribute & deliver these book sets. In the picture below, you will see the list of 10 books agreed upon by educators and they have been incorporated into our gift set. Each set costs $175, and we plan to gift at least 2 sets to each of the 16 specialty needs schools. As we hope to reach our total fundraising goal in the next months, we'll shift more money to this project and gift more sets to the additional schools where blind kids attend.

Less than 5% of the blind children are at school and/or know how to read and write. This is the privilege gap we took as a mission in BTF, and with your help, we have incorporated into a formal program. With your donations, we are delivering strong educational support for their schooling, and enrichment. Against all the technology that is out there buzzed about, learning to read braille language with their hands is still the strongest sustainable form of learning and the skill set to attain when they are young. From "Fear to Courage", we hope that many of the children we spport and reach who read the new gifted Braille books, who learn to speak and write English will continue to learn for life and one day will become university students, and graduate from College, building a confident and fearless life against all the challenges they have faced in their childhood.

Look forward to providing you more updates when these sets are delivered. Look forward to seeing their happiness and sharing them with you soon. Thank you again for making this hope and happiness happen and We are grateful for our strong partnership with Global Giving helping us reach you and serve our cause globally.

Thank you from the bottom of our hearts!

Bridge to Turkiye Fund

www.bridgetoturkiye.org.