Organizations database

Istanbul Culture and Sport Association - IKOS

In 2010, a working group comprising of relevant sport experts, artists and local volunteers active in youth work commissioned research to document the needs of disadvantaged people in İstanbul and in December 2010, IKOS was set up to provide the following:
● A community involves disadvantaged groups within mixed ages
● Awareness on Sports and Art as the tools for the empowerment of society
● Outreach sportive activities to the most vulnerable target groups
● Networking with existing inclusion and sports organizations

IKOS invests in empowerment and involvement of disadvantaged young people and kids who obtain soft skills, self-confident and shaping at their future with hope via art and sports. In order to reach the aims of IKOS, the activities have been run in 4 main fields.

1. Sport
Sport is an effective tool we use for social empowerment. Within sport field, we aim to increase the usage of sport as a tool to combat with social inequalities and social exclusion problems in our societies. IKOS focus on conducting Education Through Sport methodologies in the works of sport organizations. Education based sportive activities with hidden agenda are the major part of our sport studies in our works with refugees and immigrants, individuals with disability, women in NEET, socio-economically disadvantaged young people and seniors.

In the last 5 years, we have been cooperating with Turkish Basketball Federation, Turkish Tennis Federation, Bilgi University Sport Department, TED (Tennis Eskrim Alpinism) Sports Club, Turkish Sports Foundation, Syrian Forum, Turkish National Olympic Committee, PPI (Peace Players International), Sports Istanbul Limited Company, Göztepe Sport Club (Women Football Team) and Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality are important core partners of IKOS in the field of sport studies.

2. Culture & Art
We utilize platforms of culture and arts as a tool to approach social issues, particularly for Social Empowerment of excluded groups, such as minorities, refugees, people with physical disabilities etc. Art is an expressive tool that we use to reflect an issue and by exposing it trigger a search for its solution. Art therapy, creative drama, various theatre methods (forum theatre, invisible theatre, newspaper theatre) are used to provide open spaces for disadvantaged groups to express themselves in more comfortable ways. Additionally, IKOS has run youth projects on intercultural learning based with the participation of social and economic disadvantaged young people.

Within the help of art tools, we conduct various social responsibility projects with young people and seniors. Our aim is to come up with alternative solutions to establish bridges among people from various experiences, age, social and cultural back grounds. By implementing creative drama activities, we’re aiming at changing perspectives of young and elderly people about constantly changing frames. By providing activities in Elderly Houses, we try to promote active-aging and showing the importance of speaking the common language of generations.

3. Youth Works
Working with young people is a major part of our association. By carrying out youth works we are aiming to reach the youngsters with fewer opportunities and enable them to become active, able members of society. We encourage our young participants to volunteerism, active citizenship and raise their awareness on the issues surrounding them. We encourage our volunteers to take initiative on peer education to deliver various workshops to share their experiences and increase the competences of their peers. Additionally, we provide mentoring sessions for young people to meet with retired experts to see their success maps and give more insights about their visions.

4. International Networking
We bring together NGO’s and CSO’s which are working in similar fields and by doing so create a large international network among them. Since 2010, we’ve worked and been involved in many projects on national and international levels working with hundreds of active young volunteers. Our volunteers, which are reflective of our target group, are mixed age groups with either a background in the arts, interested in the field of culture, or are active in sports field in their own respect. Throughout these projects we’ve been in constant cooperation with both international and national NGOs. Our works have revolved around getting the youth active in and aware of the issues surrounding them while encouraging the use of arts and sport as a tool to work towards a solution. IKOS is one of the founder NGO of International Experiential Learning Network (IELN).