With our hotline operational and in good working order, we have time to go back to some of the issues we have been postponing, making necessary edits, and start thinking about the other components of the Bakad Community Center.

We want to make sure the hotline works properly and has the most impact over the longest period of time. We have been doing several things to this end. First, we increased the working hours of the hotline to every day 12:00 PM to 6:00 PM. We hope the increase in the number of days will provide additional predictability and stability to our callers. We also decided to start our shifts later in the day because we realized that practically all of our calls arrive after noon, and we are the busiest towards the end of the day. Secondly, we started a new advertisement and outreach campaign. Multiple times a week we create posts for bakad’s social media accounts that provide different facts about the hotline, answer FAQs, and allow for user feedback through polls. We boost these through Meta’s ads tool as well for greater visibility. Lastly, we have been contacting various non-LGBTQ+ organization in the city and the region so that they can suggest our hotline to their affiliates. We also want to create posters and leaflets both about our hotline and about the information we collected (of local resources on substance abuse, HIV, domestic violence, renter’s rights, etc.). That said, there have been two bombings by right-wing religious groups over the last two weeks in Diyarbakır, targeting two cafes known for their modern, secular views and artistic events. Hence, people in the region are hesitant to display any material that involves certain concepts (LGBT, HIV) and symbols (rainbow colors) and we do not want to risk putting anyone or any establishment in danger.

Lastly, we started planning for the bakad Community center in these last weeks. With the external funding I received for my living expenses in Diyarbakır and my flight back to Chicago, I was able to make some amendments to my budget, which also increased the funding I have for the furniture and electronics we can provide for the space. Bakad offices currently have two large tables and some chairs for the office workers, with a working kitchen, and two rooms used as storage for the donations they collect for LGBTQ+ people and last year’s earthquake victims. Our plan is to use our funding to get proper furniture for a meeting space in bakad as originally planned, but we also think we can do more since we have some additional funds at our disposal. First, we want to transform one of the storage rooms into a Library of Peace, which will have books and articles on peace studies, human rights, civil wars, transitional justice, and Kurdish-Turkish relations. This space will be open to public by filling an application which bakad workers will have to approve. Secondly, we want to organize a space for large screenings, with a movie projector and some (rudimentary) seating. We want to organize LGBTQ+ related movie screenings open to the public in this area to increase the strength of the LGBTQ+ organizing in Diyarbakır and foster stronger connections with people (especially young adults) who can also become members of the NGO and volunteers on the hotline in the future.

To make sure both the community center and the hotline succeeds and develops in a self-sustaining way, we also continue to apply external funding sources with all sorts of projects. We have plans for a Kurdish language gender-terms dictionary and almanac, an app for women in Diyarbakır to provide safe spaces for feminist consciousness raising, and a Kurdish language queer-feminist short story workshop which will be published as a book afterwards. The opportunity Davis Projects for Peace provided to this small NGO in Southeastern Turkey that allowed me to work with them and increased their material capacity makes all these future plans possible, and we are all very happy to be part of this experience.