Youth Season is a no-profit and non-governmental organization born in Istanbul in 2014. Youth Season has an office in Istanbul and cooperates with local governmental organisations and non-governmental organisations in Europe.
Youth Season is a no-profit and non-governmental organization born in Istanbul in 2014. Youth Season has an office in Istanbul and cooperates with local governmental organisations and non-governmental organisations in Europe. The mission of the organisation is to prepare young people to successfully meet the challenges of the nowadays society by empowering them through international learning experiences.
Youth Season promotes mobility of young people, intercultural dialogue, non-formal education including disadvantaged targets as people with different abilities, young people who have fewer opportunities such as economic difficulties, cultural differences and social obstacles. Youth Season is a training designer and provider at a local and European level. Youth Season has a consultant role for public and private bodies in order to promote and develop European projects in youth sectors.
The main activities of Youth Season consist of managing international training and mobility projects like internships, volunteering, youth exchanges and training courses. Youth Season has extensive experience in mobility projects and provided training and youth exchanges for than 350 young people in 20 different countries since 2014. We hosted more than 200 young people from various countries for our youth exchanges and training courses in Turkey.
Coordinated projects in 2019:
ICT4Society project
Youth Season is a founder and leading organisation of ICT4Society project. The ICT4Society is a movement promotes social inclusion of people with disabilities using an open-source map. This movement promotes accessibility to the social inclusion of people with disabilities and to improve the awareness of the accessibility of public facilities for persons with disabilities at national and international level. We collect accessibility data and create an accessible map for the community. ICT4Society has partner organisations from Italy (Youth OpenStreetMap Community), Germany (Intercultural Club- Goethe Uni) and UK(Youth Mappers London). Thanks to our partner, we organised mapathons( mapping meetings) in Izmir, Istanbul, Rimini, London, Istanbul and Offenbach am Main so far to enrich wheelchair accessibility data on open source map platform. We developed the Izmir Accessibility Map with the cooperation of the Izmir OpenStreetMap Community. Please check the link to see our accessibility map for Izmir (https://izmirosmcommunity.github.io/izmiraccessiblitymap.html).
Youth Hands in Hands
The project Youth Hands in Hands for Combating Drug and Substance Abuse’ which is under Structured Dialogue: meetings between young people and decision-makers in the field of youth. The project starts on 1 May 2018 and finishes on 31st of January 2019. The project contains 4 main activities. 3 of these activities will take place in Istanbul, Turkey and one of the activities will be implemented in Frankfurt, Germany. The activities are Launching and Awareness-raising meeting, Exchanging good practices, Youth Hands in Hands Report Workshop and Dissemination and Awareness-raising meeting.140 young people who are defined above came up together with decision-makers and experts in Launching and Awareness-raising meeting and Dissemination and Awareness-raising meeting 58 young people, experts and decision-makers came up together to develop youth policy fight against drug and substance abuse. The framework of the report and the training materials is shared as an output of to project in order to have follow up effect in local communities. The report is a snapshot of the European drug and substance abuse situation based on the latest available information from EU monitoring activities will be prepared during the "Youth Hands in Hands for Combating Drug and Substance Abuse". (http://www.genclerileelele.com/en/ )
Biggest Treasure: Health and Youth: The duration of the project activity was carried out with 32 young people and leaders from 6 countries in the “Biggest Treasure: Health and Youth " project to be held in Istanbul on December 20-29, 2018. The main goal of the project is to ensure that young people learn a regular lifestyle and are healthy and productive. Participants are trained using the common methods of sleeping, healthy weight loss, stress management and addiction, and they were be able to make good changes in the participants by providing them with exercises such as sports activities, meditation, forum theatre, discussion and experiential learning.
About Team
Said Turksever is a co-founder of Youth Season. He is an informatics engineer and GIS(Geographic Information System) Developer. He is currently studying a master degree in Informatics engineering at Politecnico di Milano. He is an active youth-worker and Erasmus+ project coordinator since 2011. Having already coordinated numerous Erasmus+ projects, while having also an active involvement with grassroots initiatives, in Turkey. He is in charge of strategic planning of organization and building partnership with government bodies and NGOs.
Okan Altuntaş is a graduate of Sakarya University, Department of Industrial Engineering and a master's degree in Engineering Management. He has nearly 5 years of managerial experience in the public and private sectors. He has significant experience and expertise in the fields of Regional Development, Civil Society Projects, R & D Projects and Monitoring. He is a trainer at Project Cycle Management, Project Implementation, and Entrepreneurship Areas. He has TUBITAK Mentoring Certificate in Strategic Technology and Product Management. Currently works as a Project and Investment Consultant. Since 2011, he has been involved in National Agency Projects as a project participant, Project planner, and trainer. He takes a role in our organization as a Business Development Manager.
Azade Zeynep Türksever is a graduate of Istanbul University, Department of Information and Document Management. She has worked as a librarian at Istanbul University Central Library. She is currently studying Sociology at Istanbul University. She is a general secretary of Youth Season, she is charging documentation management, accounting and financial management of the NGO. Additionally, she is taking care of the preparation of participants before the mobilities and organise dissemination activities at the local level.
Defne is our social media coordinator. She is responsible of developing communication and social media strategy for Youth Season. She continues her Psychological Counseling and Guidance education in Bahçeşehir University in the 3rd grade and also in the 1st year of Advertising with a double major. She creates our awesome contents for our lovely followers.
Arif is the core of our social media team! He is solution volunteer contributes different team in Youth Season. He is a law student and active youth worker since two years. He loves camping!
Zeki is webdeveloper of Youth Season. He is responsible of keep our website up to date and maintain the performance of youthseason.org
Selim is a member of the social media team. He assists with the questions coming to our social media accounts and help with other marketing tasks. He loves to discover new elements and socializing !