Please join us for an informal discussion with one of Turkey’s most inspiring and successful grassroots youth NGOs. YGA Founder Sinan Yaman and YGA President Asude Altıntaş will give brief presentations on the organization’s work, which will be followed by a discussion on the prospects and hopes for youth in Turkey.

YGA (Young Guru Academy) is an NGO from Turkey that works to promote social innovation for societal change. 

YGA’s voluntary work with three groups of disadvantaged communities in Turkey, the visually impaired, Syrian refugees and orphans, laid the groundwork for their social innovation projects. Through their in-house group of engineers, tech experts and entrepreneurs, they've developed WeTalk; an instant translation application to ease the social integration of Syrian refugees, and WeWalk; a smart cane along with a companion app for the visually impaired that allows them to access e-books, popular magazines, and info on practical needs. YGA recently launched a program on renewable energy and created Twin, a science toolkit for children, which raised 180,000 TL through crowdsourcing, making it Turkey’s most successful crowdsourcing campaign in history. 

Every year, 50,000 students from more than 200 universities and high schools in Turkey apply to YGA’s leadership program. 

YGA’s projects have been awarded globally, including by the United Nations, MIT, and Forbes. Since 2012, they’ve developed global partnerships with business schools at Harvard UC Berkeley and MIT