Summary of the Pro Bono week

5 events, 217 unique participations, 15 CSOs featured, 412 Pro Bono hours volunteered....high satisfaction from participants...

We close the Pro Bono week exhausted but so happy its success.

 

As C@rma, our main objective is to bring the skills of professionals to support Turkish Civil Organizations. However this is only the top of our pyramid... It is not so easy as it looks.. To reach that top we need some foundation stones which are not existing and need to be built. (See previous blog post for more details about it)

To that effect, we have then developed various events enabling to build little by little these blocks. These events are organised on a regular basis but once a year we are gathering them together during one week to make as much noise as possible around Pro Bono, to give the opportunity to every one to find at least one event where he/she could hear or do something according to his/her time or wishes.

We started by a corporate day, first a corporate breakfast with high level explanations on the benefits of Pro Bono and then a full day workshop to go deeper into the different ways to implement a corporate Pro Bono program into one's firm.

       

 

We were so glad to have for that day Joel Bashevkin, executive director from the Taproot Foundation. For me, Taproot is a little bit the Google of the Pro Bono so having them with us to give this workshop was an amazing opportunity ! During these events, we had some testimonies from Toplum Gönüllüleri Vakfi (TOG), Hayata Destek, TUSEV and TCYOV.

 

We closed the day by our Pro Bono drink open to everyone willing to know more about some CSOs. We did an open call in April and the following CSOs were very enthusiastic about participating: Cöp Madam, Kiron Academy, Toçev, Acev, SPOD, Bildiririz and Rhebeler Köpekler. They all had the opportunity to explain their activities during 10minutes before mingling with the crowd around a drink to give more details on what they are doing and what their challenges are.

 

        

 

The next day, on Wednesday, we inaugurated a new concept in a new location!

We launched for the first time the student Hackahthon in the amazing location of Impact Hub in Sanayi, a new coworking place for social entrepreneurs.

Numerous CSOs come to see us for website issues but it has been quite hard to find Pro Bono support for that. On the other side, we are often approached by high schools willing to use the skills of their students for something good.

So we gathered  Grade 9 students from Istanbul International Community School, two interested CSOs (HADD and IZEV) and some professionals to coach the students during the 3 months of the project. On May the 25th, they gathered together to assemble all the elements of the website and built it. Although we could not finish the website completely at the end of the day, this was a tremendeous push for both CSOs to finish it with everyone around the table. Check them out!

 

        

 

Friday was the biggest day with 10 sessions of Speed dating in the Bilgi Social Incubation Center (see program in the previous post).

We needed  10 different kinds of experts ranging  from education, communication, crowdfunding to social media, marketing, etc.

Based on these needs, we launched our request for Pro Bono experts asking them to commit 3-4 hours of their time on that day to support one CSO. We find them by social media, linkedin (great tool to increase our network) and through friends of friends.

These experts gathered then together based on subject with one CSO during 3 hours to help them better understand their issue and what could their action points be. The session is moderated by someone from C@rma and some students are taking notes.