ABOUT THE MILLENNIUM FELLOWSHIP - CLASS OF 2021
United Nations Academic Impact and MCN are proud to partner on the Millennium Fellowship. In 2021, over 25,000 young leaders on 2,000+ campuses across 153 nations applied to join the Class of 2021. 136 campuses worldwide (just 6%) were selected to host the 2,000+ Millennium Fellows. The Class of 2021 is bold, innovative, and inclusive.
UNITED NATIONS ACADEMIC IMPACT AND MCN PROUDLY PRESENT ECE SAĞIROĞLU, A MILLENNIUM FELLOW FOR THE CLASS OF 2021.
Koç University | İstanbul, Turkey | Advancing SDG 5 & UNAI 3
" Being a part of the Millennium Fellowship, is a crucial opportunity, as it enables to strenghten the creativity and adjustibility while it offers a global perspective on the problems. As I develop my skills throughout the program, theses skills will benefit my social work in my community and country and make my work more concrete and suitable in terms of the principles of United Nations Academic Impact and Sustainable Development Goals. I am highly excited as this program will help me to broaden my perspective and envision new ways of learning and boosting my creativity. "
Millennium Fellowship Project: Aware-IST
Aware-IST aims to reach high school students and target reducing discrimination based on gender. The high school era is important for achieving true information about sexuality and gender, yet education considering these topics are not provided by the schools as they are considered out of the norms of Turkey. Therefore, adding the fact that these schools already have gender discriminative traditions, students are not able to get informed or change the current discriminative order.
Aware-IST specifically targets public high schools with higher entrance scores in Istanbul, as their students are capable of learning and accessing gender equal norms and their demographic profile includes students from other cities as they have dormitories. Therefore, with the specific target high school, Aware-IST will reach students from different backgrounds of income, ethnicity, religiosity, and region, etc., and will become a non-discriminative project. We will be reaching students who will efficiently use this opportunity to develop their knowledge and consciousness, despite that their current awareness level is surprisingly low.
With the Aware-IST project, students will receive different workshops and pieces of training from experts in different fields. 7 weeks-long project will consist of topics such as "my body and sexuality", "being a teenage LGBTQI" etc.
By December 2021, we aim to finalize the training and workshop materials with for high schoolers. In Turkey, finalizing the negotiations with governmental agencies can be challenging, especcially when it comes to the gender breaking events. So, in order to reach a minimum of 100 students in the coming months, we will be preparing the necessary atmosphere for a free, and impactful project, and maximize the impact creation for the next phases of the project.
About the Millennium Fellow
Ece Sağıroğlu is a young and bright Molecular Biology and Genetics student in Koc University, Turkey. Since her early years, she has always be driven to create a meaningful positive change in the world which has lead her to study molecular biology and genetics to cure others diseases and also to be more active on the problems in society regarding social justice and women’s rights to cure the social problems of the society. This drive to make the world a better place is rooted in Ece’s experiences and views in her community and her constant will to create a social action. Through her high school years and now in college years, she has organized various events and attended in various organizations to touch people’s lives and now she aims to be in a profesional field that Millennium Fellowship provided to be a part of the change and show her own contribution in the development of United Nations’ Sustainable Goals while she develops herself.
