Influencers for Dialogue - 2023
July 31 - October 17 , 2023
What is Influencers for Dialogue?
The "Influencers for Dialogue" program is one of the TICSF's activities. Its main goal is to create a network of young Turkish and Israeli leaders to realize the importance of Turkish-Israel relations and work together to expose both publics to cultural similarities and encourage dialogue through digital campaigns.
In this training program participants will learn how to design political-social digital projects/campaigns that will support Israeli-Turkish relations. To do so, participants will go through a series of lectures and workshops including history of Israeli-Turkish relations, the challenges and opportunities in relations today and about digital campaigning. Participants will get to know and interact with likeminded young leaders from Israel/Turkey and form groups to compete to win a digital project competition.
Application
Applications for the program are now closed
Digital Campaigns
Applications will be evaluated by the TICSF team. If you have any questions or problems with the application, please write to ticsforg@gmail.com
Goals of this Program:
This program aims to support Israeli-Turkish relations through people-to-people interaction and digital campaigns.
To achieve the goal, the participants will design and distribute digital public campaigns on social media that will expose Turkish and Israeli publics to common interests, shared cultural costumes and similarities and shared values.
What is a “digital campaign”?
A series of posts/stories/videos that carry the message described above and is distributed on at least one social media platform for a minimum of 2 weeks.
Digital campaign competition
The participants will be divided into mixed Israeli-Turkish teams and build digital campaigns according to the material learned in the program. In the last session they will present their campaigns to a team of judges that will decide on the best campaign.
Award
The winning team members will be invited to a 3 days long seminar in Israel/Turkey. All participants who completed the course will be given a certificate. The participants also will be included to FNF’s alumni lists for special events and opportunities.
What will you learn from this program?
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History of Turkish-Israeli relations.
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Current challenges and opportunities in Turkish-Israeli relations
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Digital political campaign strategy
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Effective teamwork principles
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Psychology of digital campaigns
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How do you make an impact through social media?
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How to overcome sensitive political issues in
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Case studies of effective social/political digital campaigns
Program
The program will be carried out online via Zoom meetings.
The lectures will be between July 31 - September 4th, 2023 - every Mondayy at 18:00
Participants will present their campaigns on October 17, 2023
IFD 2022 Projects
Q’s That Build Bridges
Quiculture takes its cue from the idea of exchanging narratives and perception, throught person-to-person communication, in a quick and efficient way, with the goal of forming strong friendships and breaking down sterotypes or mysteries existing between the Israeli / Turkish socities.
How do we achieve this goal? We formed quiculture. Quiculture is an online speed networking questions forum where an Israeli (or vice versa) can sign up to have a zoom meeting with a Turk. Throughout the meeting, questions asked anonymously by both socities are presented**. These questions create the oppotrtunity for each side to learn and teach about the different cultural narratives existing, share personal stories, and hopefully form a strong connection. Quiculture is the steady bridge in which people from both cultures can feel welcome to walk across on and explore the other side respectfully.
Tracing Patterns
To shape our theme, we use the imagery of patterns to describe Anatolia by drawing similarities between the many patterns abundantly used in Turkey (in weaving and knitting) and the unique Anatolian heritage resulting from countless cultures living and marking this geography. As patterns are made up from different marks, Anatolian pattern is shaped by the traces brought and left behind.
That is why we called ourselves “Tracing Patterns”, as we are tracing the Jewish mark that resides in the Anatolian culture. As for the content, we are aiming to offer a different set of eyes to the Jewish tourists which will help them to experience Turkey with a heightened awareness. While they will still enjoy the shopping, Mediterranean beaches, historical monuments and the food, they will also be able to identify their heritage, left behind hundreds of years, still lingering in many aspects of Turkey. What we are doing is not offering an alternative purpose for their visit, but to add to their already present motivation and improve their inter-cultural experience. Our confidence in this concept comes from exactly this: We are not “pushing an agenda” so to speak, but showing them ways to add a cultural flavor that comes from their past to their plans.
Did You Know?
Aim of our project is to show people how much Israeli and Turkish people have in common (culturally, socially, linguistically, cuisine-wise etc.) and also show how much good history both Israel and Turkey and the people actually have. Also, we want to create good a association in people’s minds when they think of the other country/people of the other country.
Table for Unity
Due to religious differences, amplified by opposing stances on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the history of Turkish-Israeli relations had its ups and downs. This has resulted in (miscalculated) political actions of the two countries’ leaders, which have hindered building amicable relations between the people of these countries. As a result, people of these nations tend to approach each other with prejudice.
We, five young and vibrant activists from Israel & Turkey, are working together to make real TICSF’s 2022 Goal, “Israel and Turkey should have good, cooperative relations between its peoples”. Thus, this campaign’s aim is to develop & enhance the people-to-people communication between the societies as the key element in achieving sustainable foreignrelations system of co-operation between the nations.
In order to achieve this, our camping will focus on the shared values of the societies deriving from the culture of gatherings. In this way we hope to circumvent the strong emotions behind the prejudice of the societies. Since the issue we detected mainly depends on prejudices, communication depending on getting to know each other is necessary for this context. We want to achieve a mutual understanding due to this communication established by our promoted gathering idea. What makes this campaign unique is that it focuses on an emotion that is dear to the Turkish and Israeli people: the warmth of the family and friendship.
The emotions that people tend to have during family and friend gatherings are mostly joy, happiness, feeling safe and warmth. On this account, in this campaign, we harmonized the shared emotions and culture, which is a unique way to jump-start the communication between the Turkish and Israeli people. Moreover, this project will be successful to the extent that we will help both societies acknowledge that they are experiencing the same emotions, and that a shared culture should be placed above state politics.
Bridging the Songs
Music is an essential cultural tool with a unifying power and the ability to induce emotions worldwide. It also has excellent potential for people to bond and communicate. Cross-cultural research has established that basic emotions can be shared across cultures through music, at least on a rudimentary level of recognition. To improve the relations between the people of Turkey and Israel, we hope to sing songs and get to know each other again through songs. Through this project, people can communicate with each other and thus change misconceptions and overcome prejudices. Also, learning songs from one another can be considered a social glue. In other words, most people start hearing music from the moment they are born, often by lullabies in the scope of children’s songs, and through many of the most crucial occasions in their lives, from weddings to funerals and other ceremonies might be. As a team “bridging the songs”, we chose three specific music themes: children’s songs, wedding songs and the most interesting one “, Arabesque & Mizrachi”. Through this digital campaign, “bridging songs” can be taught that music seems to bring us closer and help us come together as communities to know each other. Music also can be considered a tool to empathise with others firmly. That is to say; music has been proven to engage various brain regions, including those that help us comprehend what others are thinking and feeling and predict how they will behave. This is called the "theory of mind," and it relates to empathy. This is a skill that music therapists usually use. Increased empathy towards others is another benefit for individuals in which creating music together — weaving lyrics, tone, tempo, and dynamics — creates opportunities for genuine relationships. Through the website “bridging songs”, people can gather around the songs and learn more about each other using our other contact information. Recent research from Portugal indicates that schoolchildren around 11 who learned about a distant land's music and culture felt more positively toward immigrants from that country than those who did not. Additionally, those positive emotions were evident three months after this exposure to the foreign culture. Felix Neto, the research team leader, says music can inspire people to travel to another emotional world. Their work shows that songs can work as a dynamic bridge between cultures, revealing feelings shared by both. We believe starting a dialogue over music, and different contents such as the lyrics, the slang, and the familiar metaphors of each language can expose another side of the culture and relation between us.
Youth4Change
Youth4change is an initiative that strives to create a student forum where Turkish and Israeli students can meet to discuss an array of issues to bind them together and normalise contact between the two. The campaign materialized into a club that would be firstly established in two universities in both of the countries. This club would either have meetings on a weekly or bi-weekly basis. The topics tackled could include what the history of Turkish and Israel relations entailed, and what the future holds for them. Nevertheless, the focus is to tackle an array of different topics, from the imminent threat of climate change and the effect that this will have on the relationship between the two countries to answering any questions that the students might have on either Turkey or Israel.
This project contrasts with the previous ones that were proposed, as firstly it will be morphed into a club, that will expose the students to either weekly or monthly dialogue and learning about Turkey or Israel. This project being a club in Turkey and Israel, will ensure that a different variety of individuals have the potential of being exposed to learning about Turkey and Israel from students, faces and people that live and can give intel from within. Therefore, this mechanism will ensure that a rather success in the field of ensuring interfaith dialogue between Israel and Turkish civil society, in this case students will be achieved. This is because, as a club, it will create a sort of habit for the participants to be exposed to learning about the culture, history, and people of either country. This project is the epitome example of what a bottom-up approach to normalization encapsulates.