The Tree of Life project of the Social Responsibility Club received support from the Youth Projects Support Program of the Ministry of Youth and Sports. With this project, the club aims to make a positive contribution to the treatment processes by planning games and activities that will spend quality time with the children who are treated in the hospital.
We talked to the Social Responsibility Club President Sema Nur Güneş and one of the project supervisors Yunus Yeşil to learn the details of the project and its origin story. Yunus Yeşil tells us how the project process has developed. Sema Nur Güneş, on the other hand, talked about the goals of the project and the traces it left on the team. First of all, let's take you to the birth story of this kindness project by leaving you alone with our interview with Yunus:
“This project should grow by spreading to other universities through the leadership of our university!”
What vision did you set for this project?
We are a social sciences university. It is very meaningful that we have started such a project, but we should not be limited to this. This project, which is currently only for students of our university, can grow by spreading to other universities through the leadership of our university. We are progressing step by step, but we take care to take the steps firmly. After realizing the first phaze of our project, we aim to develop it and apply it to larger hospitals.
How do you evaluate the interest in the project at the university?
Our project received more attention from our friends than we expected. After we announced the project to the university, we received applications from 80 of our friends and made one-on-one interviews with 60 of them, and included 20 of them in our team. We have completed the 18-hour training, we will finish the 8-hour supervision training and start our first activities in our room in Başakşehir State Hospital as soon as possible.
“We want hospitals to no longer to be made up of dull walls and pale colors for children!”
Sema Nur Güneş, President of the Social Responsibility Club, answered the question "Why the Tree of Life?" as follows:
The reason why we chose the name of our project as the "Tree of Life" was, of course, because for us, the tree means life. Within the scope of our project, we aim to bring our forests, which have been seriously destroyed, back to life. In other words, we want the children, who are our future, to leave a truly valuable gift for their future. In other words, we sincerely hope that life will regain its old breath. If I need to elaborate, we aim to plant a sapling on behalf of each child we are interested in within the scope of the project. Our goal is to create a forest that will bear the name of our project over time.
We are volunteers…
Because we exist!
Because we are aware!
Because we can't ignore it!
Because volunteering is essential!
And of course, we love children!
As Tree of Life volunteers, we are aware that we truly love what we do. Being able to give hope, joy, and love to our little friends is the value we attach most importance to. The "Tree of Life" helps us to keep our sense of responsibility alive in this regard.
How was your education process? What did you do in this process?
While I was training on the Tree of Life project, I learned a lot about many different subjects. Although once I was a child, I realized that I learned to think as a child, to laugh as a child, at least I experienced this. As children, we all wanted to grow up as soon as possible, and I would like that too, but the most obvious sentence I heard from my environment is that 'the golden period of life is hidden in the childhood years', I agree. In my opinion, every person should have a child in their life, to keep their inner child alive, to be purified from the evil of the world, and to remain innocent. In fact, if we take a moment to think about it; ‘We have so much to learn from children.’
What is your main purpose for this project?
We want hospitals to no longer to be made up of dull walls and pale colors for children! In our Tree of Life project, we aim to be with the children who have to spend time in the hospital at a young age for certain periods, to play games with them and carry out various activities, to introduce different activities to the children who stay in the hospital environment due to health problems, even for a few hours, and to color the children's polyclinics thanks to the playroom we will create for this reason. We owe them to prepare an environment where they can use their imaginations most actively by reaching the innocent world of children.
