News From BTF 4Kids Programs…

Vicdan Babaloglu Akyurek
Building Bridges
Published in
4 min readJul 8, 2019

“The colors of the world will never disappear as long as people like you exist.”

“The colors of the world will never disappear as long as people like you exist” a rural student wrote to us when his class of 15 students received new winter boots, coats and school bags…Receiving such meaningful letters from students and teachers give us one more reason to keep doing what we are doing at Bridge to Turkiye Fund..

From the beginning of this school year, we listened to the teachers who reached us and we had sent 1062 boots and 1001 coats to rural students in 20 village schools..Every school year, during winter, we try to reach as many students as possible through our 4Kids Programs. Thanks to our generous donors like you, we manage to deliver warmth and happiness to hundreds of rural students every winter…

Going forward, we decided to carry some of our 4Kids Programs to Global Giving platform to combine them with Boots4Kids&Sneakers4Kids projects in order to be able to reach more donors. These projects are SchoolBags4Kids, Books4Kids, Dictionaries4Kids and EducationalToys4Kids. Other projects will follow them to be on Global Giving platform in the future such as Science4Kids, Art4Kids and Music4Kids…

Since the beginning of 2018–2019 school year, we have sent 33 sets of elementary level story books,16 sets of kindergarten level books, 24 sets of educational toys, 1800 English-Turkish-Turkish-English dictionaries to 1800 students in 17 schools, 300 English Story Books to 300 students in elementary and secondary schools, 16 sets of Science4Kids sets, and 18 sets of Arts4Kids, 14 Sets of Music4Kids, 998 school bags to 20 schools, 1250 pairs of sneakers to 31 schools, as well as boots and coats…

How do 4Kids Programs help rural students in Turkey? Our Kindergarten book set has 80 picture books and elementary level book set has 135 picture books from Turkish and World literature. The aim of Books4Kids project is to improve reading level of students and help them introduce different worlds, ideas and characters. Studies let us know that daily reading helps improve student success, increase fluency, comprehension, vocabulary and grammar while nurturing creativity, critical thinking as well as challenging students to be better readers...Many rural students carry everything to school in plastic bags…Schoolbags4Kids filled with school supplies lift their spirit and give them confidence.

A lot of classrooms in rural Turkey lacks educational materials… EducationalToys4Kids project help kindergartners gain motor skills and problem solving skills as well as helping them use their imagination…

Science4Kids project encourages hands on learning and curiosity through variety of lab experiments. Finally, Art4Kids project helps students to be more creative and expressive through using variety of art supplies…

In this school year with eight projects combined, Bridge to Turkiye Fund has delivered much needed educational materials to more than 10,000 students in rural Turkey as well as happiness and hope…

With your support and generosity, we are planning on reaching more students and enriching the lives of as many kids as possible in the coming months…

As one of the teachers put it “You make life worth living and the world a better place…”

Thanks a million for your generosity and trust in us…

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