About US

Our association was founded in 2002 in order to support children living or working on the streets, young people, their families, people who have barriers to access to social facilities or who are subjected to negative discrimination, in short, Individuals in Difficult Conditions. Our association, which was previously called "BEHİCE EREN Youth Centre Support Association", had to change its name to the current name with the change of laws. The work of our association initially focused on the families receiving support from the "BEHİCE EREN Youth Centre" under the "Ministry of Family and Social Policies". Later on, we also included local municipalities and their target groups and our work was supported by Ankara Metropolitan Municipality, Altındağ Municipality, Çankaya Municipality, Yenimahalle Municipality, Middle East Technical University, Hacettepe University. We received financial support from the Ministry of European Union, Directorate for Education and Youth Programmes. Every year, our association organises the "Day for Combating Child Labour" on 12 June. In addition, we support our children to do active sports, to gain sportsman consciousness and spirit and to grow up as healthy individuals. We established the Güçkobir sports club to give them the opportunity to become national athletes. The main reason for establishing this new club was to give our children the chance to prepare themselves for competitions and to guide them to achieve their goals. To date, our children have become world champions, second and third in Capoeira and Mauay Thai. In other branches, we won Ankara and Central Anatolia Championships and came third in Turkey. Güçkobir has supported many of our children to receive training and has seen their success. We organised for one of our children to study in Ukraine and return as an aircraft engineer, for our Erciyes Law Faculty graduate to prepare for the prosecution and judgeship exam. A young woman graduated from the tourism and hotel management department. We also have 2 children studying social work and 7 children preparing for university exams. Our association ensured that 225 children regularly benefit from the swimming pools of the Middle East Technical University. With the help of Datça Municipality, we went camping twice in 2002 and organised trips to various touristic places of our country. In 2002, we gave trainings on human rights, children's rights and women's rights in primary schools and gave lectures on substance addiction. We also did free photo shoots with our children and helped them gain photography skills. Our association helped 55 mothers to complete the first stage and 22 mothers to complete the second stage and to get diplomas. 7 mothers received the necessary support to obtain a high school diploma. Two of them got their driving licences and can now drive a car. We helped 35 fathers learn a profession and get a job. Güçkobir has carried out many projects with European programmes such as "Rising Star Turkey", "Elimination of Child Labour", "Dance is Happiness", "Understand Me", "Volunteering for Street Children" and "Elele for Music". Until today, we have carried out youth exchanges with Austria, Germany, Belgium, Netherlands, Portugal, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia, Czech Republic, Hungary, Bulgaria, Greece, Romania, Macedonia, Ukraine, Italy, Spain, Lithuania and Latvia. 50 Turkish young people benefited from this programme and more than 100 young people from partner countries were hosted by us. In addition, within the scope of the "Dance Animea" project, young people from Bulgaria, Lithuania and Romania were taught Turkish dances and our children were taught their national dances. Our last project was the "Clean up the world" event, where we tried to show the importance of cleanliness and environmental awareness to our children and society, with participation from 135 countries of the world.