EASE OF ‘GOODWILL’ BROUGHT BY CAMPUS YOUTH

Continuing its volunteering movement that has grown with the participation of students, alumni, staff members, and academics inspired by the slogan “Campus, where there is goodwill”, Yaşar University still undertakes many volunteering activities that address everyone’s needs during the COVID-19 pandemic.  Over one thousand students and alumni have been actively involved in this process where they helped those who had to stay home, offered distance courses, fed stray animals, and narrated books.

The number of students participating in projects to offer their goodwill during volunteering works of thousands of hours and to ease lives of thousands reached nearly nine thousand at Yaşar University, where students are required to pass the social responsibility course -equal to one credit- to graduate.

As part of the social responsibility course that allowed students to cooperate with over 100 NGOs and various public institutions, a number of favors were done including environmental cleaning, collecting food for stray animals and constructing shelters for them, establishing libraries at schools in villages, provision of clothes for people in need, blood donation, and creating forests by planting young trees.

BOTH TEACHING AND CLEANING

Noting that we have been taught many new habits by the pandemic, Yaşar University Coordinator of Social Responsibility Affairs Kevser Çimenli said, “The most important of these habits is the reinforcement in our relationships with our neighbors. Thanks to the ‘volunteer for your neighbor’ movement we have executed since the beginning of the pandemic, our students helped many of their neighbors with risk of severe illness meet their market needs. The students also offered children of their neighbors online or one-to-one teaching support to help them keep up with their educational needs. The online teaching supports offered were in music, maths, and languages including English, German and Turkish. One thousand hours of online teaching, eight hundred hours of environmental cleaning two hundred and fifty hours of maintenance repair and cleaning works for animal shelters were offered by nearly one thousand and five hundred students”

Kevser Çimenli

BOOKS NARRATED

27 students did book narration in collaboration with Boğaziçi University’s  Technology and Education Laboratory for Individuals with Visual Disability. Ezgi Akdağ, student at Yaşar University Faculty of Human and Social Sciences, said,

“I was really excited when I first heard about this project. The idea of narrating for individuals with visual disabilities has been very useful and special for me. Therefore, I started working for this project right away. I had to go through some phases before actually doing the narration. I am happy to have been involved in this project and want to continue with other books as well.”