In her article titled "A Very Famous Policy Document!", Hatice Kapusuz, one of the mentors of the BİRLİKTE Institutional Support Program, wrote the following about these documents: "A policy document is a learning memory that emerges at the end of a process in which the organization and its members engage with themselves, reflect on the issues, and share their experiences. It is a tool for clarification, mutual understanding, and naming the problems correctly."
In the BİRLİKTE program, which we designed with a learning organization approach, organizations participate with their mentors to create policy documents for their structures. One of the organizations in this process is the Migration and Humanitarian Aid Foundation (GİYAV). We asked GİYAV about this challenging document preparation process in order to support organizations working on this topic.
First of all, we are curious about how you decided to create this document. Why did you feel the need to prepare a policy document?
The Migration and Humanitarian Aid Foundation (GİYAV) began its work in 1999 in Mersin, one of the provinces most affected by internal migration due to village burnings and forced evacuations. However, instead of focusing solely on the concept of "migration," the foundation identified the different impacts of migration on women due to gender inequality and initiated a unique project in this field. Additionally, they aimed to take a holistic approach by addressing various other areas such as ecology, mother tongue, and children’s rights. In 2010, when the foundation moved its headquarters to Amed (Diyarbakır), it realized that while the Kurdish Women’s Movement was very strong, no organization was focusing on children, and thus, children became the target group of their work.
The reason we are sharing this process is to emphasize that our organization had an awareness of this issue 25 years ago, when gender was barely discussed by any institution. Although we don’t have a written document on gender, we are proud to say that we have an oral tradition and a well-established organizational culture regarding gender.
Well, since you have such a well-established organizational culture, we can almost hear the question: why did you feel the need for this document? The answer we found after discussing this was: because the "masculinity contract" has much stronger and older roots. When combined with the "Turkishness contract" and the "Islamic contract," which form the foundations of this country, it perpetuates a sexist, racist, discriminatory, and harmful system every day. This system, which feeds on itself, produces unequal relations that are constantly changing and manipulative, and those fighting against it need definitions and mechanisms that are also constantly changing and evolving.
With this document, we aim to clarify the ambiguity in concepts by identifying definitions agreed upon by the organizational subjects, raise awareness of gender within the organization, and systematize our gender-based decision-making practices in daily work or activities with children into a written document. We also want to create monitoring mechanisms that will clarify the institution’s approach in the event of violations. Although we have applied various methods in practice, the document will be a way for the organization to establish a position independent of individuals.
The preparation process was probably not easy. Can you share what you went through?
As we were writing this document, we wondered to ourselves if we were too Kurdish again. Once again, we connected everything, once again, we said that we can't find a solution to any of them without finding a solution to all of them. Once again, we couldn’t separate the topics from each other, as expected of us, as it should be (?). Then, we questioned who decides or could decide what should be. In the face of the organization and wholeness of the evil before us, our struggle has become one in search of a holistic solution, a realization that sometimes we can only express our concerns with sentences consisting of six lines. This is not a choice, but a necessity. Whether we call it intersectionality or inclusivity, without knowing, it’s the anxiety of not leaving anyone behind, the anger towards those who do not feel this anxiety, and perhaps a bit of bitterness.
A method that comes from seeing the hidden pattern between the exclusion of a Kurdish woman activist from speaking about alimony rights—without an intersectional basis—and the absolute exclusion of a woman lawyer from explaining cadastral law. Despite being able to find a place for ourselves as ‘subjects of the field,’ even if tokenistically, on issues related to war and conflict, when the topic is not directly related to Kurdish children (we don’t know how this is even possible), the feeling of being relegated to the periphery in a study is perhaps the anger we feel about being treated like a laboratory subject. No matter what we do, no matter how well we do it, the feeling that it is never enough. The life cycle in which others know what’s best, and we are always in a learning position. Therefore, this document’s emphasis on unequal relationships, without establishing a hierarchy between inequalities and without separating them from each other, is not just due to our need to express ourselves but also due to the intersectionality of colonialism and patriarchy. We do not think that we could solve this with just one document, nor do we think we can solve it with five separate documents. When we need to choose between two methods with equal results, perhaps because we don’t know how they differ, we chose a holistic approach. We have no regrets.
Preparing a policy document should be a process supported by participation and inclusivity. So, what did you do for this preparation process, how did you get ready?
To run a participatory process, we invited all management, employees, and volunteers to the workshops we organized. Unfortunately, no one attended the meetings other than those actively working in the organization. So, we conducted the workshops with the foundation president (the only person from the management), four employees, and three volunteers.
We actively discussed the our mentor’s questions with those actively working in the organization, sometimes unable to convince each other, and had repeated discussions. We noted the topics that emerged during these discussions, and two of our colleagues took responsibility for the writing process. We did not include any issues or sentences with annotations from any of the workshop participants in the document we prepared. We presented the draft of the document again to the same team for approval, and we made revisions based on their feedback. We sent the revised draft to our female friends (mentors) with whom we have a joint collaboration at BİRLİKTE and are progressing on the same GEMİ, and we are currently waiting for their suggestions. The policy document, which will undergo some changes based on the feedback and criticisms, will be opened for the management board’s suggestions, and we will make the necessary revisions according to their feedback.
What did your organization learn or realize from the process of preparing this document?
The biggest learning for our organization was the shared awareness that emerged from the discussions we had about how we define gender inequality. Hearing the examples we encountered in practice while conducting these discussions increased our awareness on many issues we didn’t previously consider gender-related. Additionally, we confessed to each other how much the other forms of discrimination, which occur in parallel with and interact with gender-based discrimination, are present and effective in our lives. We faced the reality that the elements we call organizational culture are actually subject to the subjectivity of each individual, and everyone carries different experiences and perspectives in their hands. When sharing the feeling of inequality we experienced not only in internal relations but also in the relationships we developed with other organizations and individuals, we saw how much we share common experiences, and this allowed us to name the discrimination we face regarding our intersectional identities. Our inability to view intersectionality separately opened the ground for re-discussing the source of the problem.
One of the biggest learnings for our organization was the realization that, as part of our claim to prioritize children’s participation rights, we couldn’t define the principles and mechanisms regarding children. We agreed that we had no right to define these for children. However, since we constantly work with children, we also realized that we needed a document in this area. These two circumstances led us to plan a six-month study for a policy document to be written by children, where they would define their principles, definitions, and mechanisms.
What changes have you observed in your organization after this preparation?
Although this document has not yet reached its final version, we can clearly state that even just initiating the discussion has significantly increased our awareness.
The most tangible example of this is that we named the gender-based and patriarchal attitude towards female employees in the relationship with a third party from whom we regularly procure services, and we ended the service procurement contract. Additionally, after the discussions, we started to examine our everyday practices more comfortably from a gender perspective. We began to prioritize this topic more in workshops with children and to review every subject in our strategic plan in this context. Therefore, it would not be wrong to say that it has opened the way for change and made us stronger.