Partner of the Week: Habitat Association

Posted in Partner of The Week on August 6, 2020

Habitat Association is an NGO focused on sustainable development based in Turkey. It was founded in 1997 after being inspired by a group of activists at the Copenhagen Social Development Summit of 1995 and the United Nations Habitat II Summit. Their vision is to bridge world youth and Turkish youth by increasing the capacities of children, young people, women and disadvantaged groups through their projects and programmes aimed for sustainable development.

As a part of UNICEF Turkey’s short-term national corporate consultancy programme, they have implemented the Aflatoun curriculum as tools for social and financial education.

Digital Learning in times of COVID-19

Before the spread of COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent restrictive measures, Habitat Association was performing all their activities on the field as face to face collaborations are an important part of their philosophy. However, as part of the measures taken, they had to make major changes to their educational practices adapting them to digital learning.

Thanks to their intensive work and efforts they were able to able to adapt quickly to this new order, by creating new training contents, organising live broadcasts, meetings and workshops. They actually encountered situations where they could take action faster, compared to their previous experience. Habitat also increased their participation quota – from 180 people per coordination meeting to more than 270 online.

“Distance has disappeared. All of a sudden we were able to reach people from all 81 provinces in Turkey which wasn’t possible before.” — Staff member

Covideathon Events

Covideathon is one of Habitat’s latest online activities aiming to educate young people between 14 – 17 years of age and diminish their fears and anxieties around the COVID-19 virus by supporting their abilities to cope with any secondary impacts in lives.

Students were expected to create technology-oriented solutions for problems caused by COVID-19 in Turkey. Morethan 339 young people attended the first 3 Covideathon activities. A total of 17,000 TL was awarded to the teams that entered the rank!

InovaTeam was the first with its robot project that aims to disinfect the area with “ultraviolet” rays. The second was the Covcam team, which developed an application that can be used for COVID-19 virus detection. The third was The Optimizers team with the application project that directed the plasma therapy against COVID-19 virus to the right person.

Interested in learning more about our partners? Read more in our Partner of the Week blogs.