Strengthening Civil Society Dialogue in Turkey, 2018-2020

The Project, supported by UNDEF, was designed with the aim of creating new grounds and mechanisms to enable dialogue, cooperation and negotiation among CSOs, for a more effective and democratic understanding of civil society. It was aimed to establish dialogue among CSOs from different identities and origins in Turkey and to create new mechanisms to make possible collaborations among CSOs as well as to contribute to the strengthening of democratic participation of CSOs in policy processes.

In this direction; a series of Meydan meetings began to be organized to discuss the issues on the civil society agenda under different themes, and to become a common ground for civil society that can break the polarizing effect it produces by pulling the ethnic, religious and cultural identity-oriented diversity of politics to a shallow competition focused on power, deepening within the boundaries of the issues it deals with.

In June 2018, the first of the square meetings brought together CSO’s that working in various fields to talk about cities where differences can coexist, with the call of“come together to discuss “the cities in which we live in”.The second Meydan, “Whose issue is the refugee issue?” was held in November 2018 in order to talk about the studies in the field of refugee with CSO’s from different backgrounds, to discuss the needs in this field together, and to discuss how life together can be possible together.

Third Meydan was brought together  civil society organizations, academicians and local government representatives working in fields such as education, children, women, and disabilities under the question of “What is the role of local administrators in education?

Following the Meydan meetings, workshops were organized with smaller groups on issue-based dialogue and advocacy.

Within the scope of the project, a reseach was conduct on the visibility of civil society in the media and a search conference was held to discuss the outputs with relevant opinion leaders.

Meydan manifest

Meydan Meetings Reports

Thenewsproduce scope of the Meydan