The Knitting For Hope Social Initiative was launched on 20 December 2020 by university, graduate and doctoral students living in Şanlıurfa. The idea of the project sprouted with the training they received within the scope of the Erasmus+ project “Inclusion of Refugee Youth through Social Entrepreneurship”, in which the members of the team participated together. With the entrepreneurial ideas developed during the trainings, the young people asked, “How can we provide social benefit in the society?” they began their work. While developing our social entrepreneurship project, there were many important factors that we focused on. We aimed to create awareness with our women-only team and to create the social aspect of our project by working with immigrant and local women. Thus, we set out with the aim of getting to know each other better between the local people and the immigrant people, and contributing to social cohesion by producing new things together. Later, we focused on the idea of designing and producing amigurumi toys, macrame bags, key chains, bookends and bookcase accessories while considering how immigrant and local women can be employed in their homes and how we can achieve social harmony together. We started our work with the idea of social entrepreneurship, where we will create an economic area of employment for women and provide positive interaction in the process of adapting to living together. In line with this idea, we set out with the migrant women with whom we had met through various projects before. The positive feedback we receive from them increases our motivation every day and we gain new experiences every day.We have organized three separate amigurumi knitting trainings so far, and we have included new members in our team in each training period. We had the opportunity to get to know each other better and increased our production with a faster integration than we expected during the training process. While our team was 11 people, including the management team, when we first started our project, we are currently working with 40 immigrants and local women within the scope of the project. The amigurumi toys produced meet their buyers both at home and abroad. So far, we have sent our toys to various countries such as Italy, Portugal, America, Canary Islands and Syria. In addition, we give amigurumi toys to children with limited opportunities in return for the toys sold. In this way, on the one hand, it helps women to support their families economically by touching their lives, and on the other hand, we reach children with limited opportunities and put a smile on their faces with the toys we donate. The positive feedback we receive motivates us to work harder and reach wider audiences. If you want to learn more about how our Knitting For Hope Social Initiative is progressing, you can reach us from our social media accounts. You can also follow our initiative on our Twitter: @HopeKnitting, Instagram: knitting_for_hope accounts.
