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