The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies is the world's largest humanitarian organization, providing assistance without discrimination as to nationality, race, religious beliefs, class or political opinions.
Federation
is founded in 1919, the International Federation currently comprises 176 member
Red Cross and Red Crescent societies, a Secretariat in Geneva and more than 60
delegations strategically located to support activities around the world. The
Red Crescent is used in place of the Red Cross in many Islamic countries.
The mission of the Federation is to improve the lives of
vulnerable people by mobilizing the power of humanity.
Turkish Red Crescent and German Red Cross are two members of the International Federation of the Red Cross & Crescent. German Red Cross wants to cooperate with the Turkish Red Crescent to help them increase the capacity of its branches.
Izmit is one of the places that was highly damaged in the earthquake and that�s why the activities of the Red Crescent became more important than ever to meet the needs of vulnerable people. For that reason this branch needs this capacity development program to be implemented.
So why do they need us? Our task in this project is to improve the communication between the Izmit branch of Red Crescent and German Red Cross and by this way helping the branch to develop its capacity.
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The aim of this project is to help Izmit branch to develop its capacity by increasing the activity areas. This will make Izmit branch to became more capable of helping vulnerable people. Therefore the most important part of the project is to develop such activities appropriate for German Red Cross requirements and to the region�s socioeconomic conditions.
The developed activities must be feasible so that they can be implemented easily and beside this they must be sustainable in a manner so that they would be able to carry out it without outsourcing resources.
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The activities done up to now can be summarized under the four major headings:
1.Get an idea about Red Cross
and Crescent activities in general
Our first step was to get an idea about RC activities in general. Although the RC name was familiar to all of us from newspapers and TVs the exact statement of who they are, what they do, where they work and why the do so were found from mission and vision statements of RC and related reports. Some of useful sources of information were given by Galip Ozgur Yaziyurt, who works on the KIZILAY activities in the German Red Cross, and websites of International Federation of Red Cross (IFRC) and Turkish Red Crescent Society (TRCS). Erol Sayin also has lead us through out the project. Next we tried to concentrate on the activities of RC in Izmit. That is to say read reports, summaries of projects done by RC in Izmit so far.
2.
Visit the branch
The other important milestone in our activities was to visit the project place Izmit RC Branch. It was important from different aspects such as issues, problems stated by people in charge of activities at Izmit branch. It was helpful to understand and visualize what was actually going on in Izmit branch. That is to say, identify the current situation: what are the current activities of RC, Izmit branch organizational structure and etc. Moreover, the visit was necessary to collect most recent data, and see ongoing problems and projects.
3. Consult with concerned
authorities
Erol Sayin first introduced the project to us and gave some explanations about the points of the project. Then he guided us to contact with the other authorities involved in the project. One of these people was Ozgur Galip Yaziyurt. He explained in detail of what was expected from us, how we could be helpful, why they need us. Nesrin (a voluntary member in the branch) also introduced the environment and the conditions to us while we were in Izmit. Osman Saricam who is one of the authorities in the branch talked with us about the situation and stated the problems.
4. Collect data
We get the information about the socioeconomic condition of Izmit city and its surroundings. This information contains the level of damage caused by the earthquake in 18 August 1999, the education level of Izmit population and other major shortages and constraints. These data are necessary to be able to define and generate activities suitable to the region.
5. Generate Alternatives
After identifying the problems of current situation we did brainstorming where the members of the team express their ideas, which will be helpful in solving the current problem.
After this some suitable alternatives were defined and analyzed. The ones that satisfy the conditions are picked for further study. We come up with the following alternatives.
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The workshop that will be founded will produce simple and most widely used housing tools such as trinket or electric plugs.
The workshop�s employees will be selected from vulnerable people. These may be from disabled or poor people.
Moreover, while employing these people, thoughts and mission of the Red Cross will be injected to them in order to change the reputation of the branch among people.
Another useful alternative is to extend the hospital. Some new facilities such as children clinic can be added. This will increase the capacity of the hospital, so the hospital will be able to service more people in various medical fields.
The Izmit branch can offer some first aid training programs to the surrounding firms that need to employ people in these areas. For example, driving courses need to employ trained people about the first aid and the branch can provide this training.
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While carrying out our project we have faced with some external difficulties. These
can be summarized as follows.
The distance between Izmit and Ankara is not suitable to make frequent visits. This makes it difficult to corporate with branch and makes necessary observations about the situation and environment.
Not only the lack of frequent visits caused by the distance but also unwillingness of the authorities of the Izmit branch towards the project caused lack of communication between these authorities and us.
The authorities of the Izmit branch believe that they have some more important things to do - developing the eye clinic- before this project. Therefore they do not give priority to this project and prefer to stay indifference.
German Red Cross believes that the branches should give the priority to this project and implement the self-development program soon. The opinion of the GRC causes confliction with the authorities� objectives. This confliction slows down the progress of the project.
The unwillingness of the authorities leads them not to study on the project, which results in unavailability of concrete data.
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Beaside all the external difficulties mentioned before we also have faced with some internal difficulties also which can be summarised as follows
1. Scheduling
The main reason for scheduling problem is the fact that we take different courses on different hours. This makes it difficult to arrange team meetings. The other problem is that the branch works on working week days. However we could visit the branch only at weekends.
2. Lack of experience
Since none of us has involved in such a project we didn�t have idea about the RC activities. Since we have not experienced any real life project before, we faced some difficulties such as collecting abstract data.
3. Lack of background knowledge
Up to now we are educated in technical perspective. However, the project we are encountered includes socioeconomic aspects. Also our education was concentrated on large industrial enterprises and profit organizations, but the Kizilay organization is a non-profit organization.
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In our further study, the first step is to choose one activity among the ones we have generated. While choosing the activity we will benefit from SWOT and PEST Analysis and also from Benefit Cost Ratio.
In this part of our study, we will deal with our alternative we have chosen, in the sense of its consistency with German Red Cross requirements and sustainability. It is important that the project can be applied easily in terms of the monetary conditions.
After the necessary studies we will bring the project into a formal report format and submit it to the German Red Cross.
After the submission the remaining step is the verification of the report by the authorities of the German Red Cross. In this step the project will be evaluated either as applicable or not.
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To handle with this real world problem, we have used our experience and knowledge to define our system and draw its boundaries using system approach. So far, we tried to define the problems and thought on some solution alternatives. Throughout the remaining part of the project we will study on these solution alternatives and evaluate them.
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