Our hotline has its volunteer operators! Last week we had our preliminary meetings and agreed with 8 of the applicants. They are a diverse cohort, Turkish and Kurdish, men and women, straight and queer, ranging from their 20s to late 30s. We had our first meeting yesterday on June 14th, to meet each other (all the volunteers, NGO workers, and professional trainers), get to know bakad, and discuss on our shared community values and ethical commitments.
This meeting had to be online as I am waiting for the Kurban Bayrami (the Eid al-Adha) to end on June 19th, before moving to Diyarbakir and our trainers are living in different cities in Turkey. Plus, we decided that it makes little sense to fly the trainers to Diyarbakir for the training sessions. Nevertheless, it is very important for volunteers to meet in person and develop the interpersonal relations that are crucial for this hotline to remain operational. Our conversations with other NGOs who attempted similar projects in the past warned us that the most important thing for a hotline is volunteer retention, so we want to make sure there are enough interactions to develop the relations of trust and mutual responsibility among our operators.
In the meantime, we figured out how to navigate the Turkish tax law in signing our service procurement contracts, and we distributed the subjects to be covered in the training program to the next two weeks, so that the hotline will become operational on July 1st as originally planned. According to this revised program, we will start right after the Eid al-Adha:
- Thursday, June 20th, 18:00 – 21:00
– Turkish Criminal Law: Rights and Obligations in Theory and Practice - Sunday, June 23rd, 10:00 – 14:30 and 13:00 – 15:00
– Foundational terms and approaches in LGBTQ+ issues
– Myths and Reality: LGBTQ+ experiences, prejudices, and misinformation
– Discrimination and Internalized Phobias
– Facts of HIV: Prevention, Transmission, Treatment
– Talking About Substance Abuse and Addiction - Saturday, June 29th, 10:00 – 13:30 and 14:00 – 17:00
– Providing Emotional Support and Personal Boundaries
– Approaching Risky Cases: Talking about self-harm
– Talking about Coming Out of the Closet
– Talking about Relationships and Sexuality
– Turkish Renters Law: Theory and Practice - Sunday, June 30th, 10:00 – 13:00 and 13:30 – 15:30
– Talking about Sexually Transmitted Infections
– Talking about Gender Reassignment Processes
– Role-Play Session
– Communication Best Practices: How to be an effective team player
– Summary and Technical Information: How to operate a hotline
This also means that we will be connecting with lawyers, psychologists, social workers, and compiling all the information our operators will be referring to in the next two weeks! It will be a mountain of work but meeting the volunteers and hearing their experiences and commitments pushes us forward.