WK 313 Engaging government resources

What better way for government to express its commitment to human rights than by providing concrete resources? Taking time to explore and determine these potential resources can provide significant long-term results. These examples highlight the use of government resources by developing collaborative efforts between nongovernmental organizations and government bodies.

Panelists

Featured Tactic: Guvem Ture and Ipek Ilkkaracan, Women for Women’sHuman Rights, Turkey Complementary Presentations:

• Camelia Doru, ICAR Foundation, Romania
• Robert Gjedia, Institute for Pedagogical Research, Albania

Featured Tactic

Engaging government resources to institute women’srights education Guvem Ture and Ipek Ilkkaracan, Women for Women’sHuman Rights, Turkey

• View Guvem Ture and Ipek Ilkkaracan’s PowerPoint presentation 10,296 KB

The Women for Women’sRights Project– "New Way" in Turkey, gained the financial support of government to implement human rights education for women. This support allowed the organization to carry their program out much more extensively in communities, reaching many more people in the country. The group wanted to create a human rights education program that was sustained and promoted in a more institutionalized way so that it would have a significant impact on women’slives. The group gained the support of the general directorate of the government social service department to implement the program in its entirety, including an agreement that the sixteen modules would be taught without changes. Additional modules could be added and would be welcomed to address specific regional issues identified by the women themselves but the core program would remain the same. They implemented the project among government social workers and community centers. The project has provided group facilitator training to 94 social workers in 28 cities and has involved more than 1,300 women in the program. The organization provides ongoing consultation and support to the trained social workers through letters, phone calls and site visits.

Complementary Presentation

Camelia Doru, ICAR Foundation, Romania

• View Camelia Doru’s PowerPoint presentation 6,934 KB

Torture victims in Romania face a society where many prefer to forget the past – and its victims – rather than learn from it to build a deeper commitment to human rights. The ICAR Foundation convinced Romania’s government to acknowledge its responsibility to those who had suffered at the hands of the former regime by providing the physical premises for torture treatment centers and the right to free medicine and insurance coverage for the specialized services that torture survivors required.

Complementary Presentation

Robert Gjedia, Institute for Pedagogical Research, Albania

• View Robert Gjedia’s PowerPoint presentation 207 KB
• Read the tactical notebook Educating the Next Generation

A highly successful collaboration between the Institute for Pedagogical Research, a government institution for curricular development, and the Albanian Centre for Human Rights, a nongovernmental organization, resulted in the inclusion of human rights education in all public schools in the country to prepare citizens for democracy in a post-communist nation. Within a decade, the collaboration created special curricula for all age groups, trained thousands of teachers to use the materials, launched 42 pilot schools and a curriculum that integrated teaching human rights into the teachers’ colleges.