A Common Challenge – Two Different Cultural Perspectives

The work of the Güven Health and Education Foundation, which focuses on the Aging Population, gained a new momentum by moving to the international cooperation dimension with our latest EU-supported project.

Works of Güven Education and Health Foundation that focus on Aging Population have gained momentum by reaching to international cooperation level with our most recent EU-funded project. Our project “A Common Challenge – Two Different Cultural Perspectives” that we partnered with Kennisland Foundation from the Netherlands is supported within the scope of “Civil Society Dialogue Programme”. Focusing on the aging population and elderly care in the Netherlands and Turkey, our project evaluates the context in both countries from the perspective of culture. Therefore, the objective is to reach a more comprehensive synthesis by revealing out approaches of both countries to aging, determine strong and weak points and having both countries learn from each other. Within scope of the project, actors of academic, public and private sectors, particularly Nongovermental Organizations, will work on and learn aging in a collaborative manner and international cooperations will be established. Experiences of the EU and the Netherlands that have a longer history than Turkey on development of policies, practices and social awareness in terms of the elderly and aging by addressing such issues as a social and systemic problem will contribute to studies conducted on this field which has been gradually gaining popularity in our country. The elderly, related segments, families, Turkish people who live in the Netherlands and Dutch people who visit our country and prefer to spend the period of retirement in Turkey will be the beneficiaries of the project. The project activities include the working groups participated by academic and social experts, cooperation between non-governmental organizations of both countries through reciprocal visits, compiling and releasing true stories to maximize visibility of elderliness and organizing a well-attended international conference in Turkey. Project’s website (www.ACommonChallenge.org) will be accessible for everyone who wants to follow the project.