Map of Needs Project Initiated in Beşiktaş – City of Solidarity!

We bring together our citizens in need and our helpful citizens willing to support them through the Beşiktaş Map of Needs Social Welfare Management System…

Our municipality has launched the "Beşiktaş Map of Needs Social Welfare Management System" project, bringing together citizens in need of social support and benefactors. The press launch of the project was held at our Municipality’s Mustafa Kemal Center on Tuesday, April 13 with the participation of the Beşiktaş Mayor Rıza Akpolat, artist Mert Fırat who is one of the founding partners of the Map of Needs, and Esra Arslan who is one of the Board Members of the Map of Needs.

Always standing by our citizens in need by coming up with projects that create social benefits in order to strengthen social solidarity, our municipality has accomplished another project. Thanks to the initiated social solidarity, the requirements of people in need such as rentals, bills, scholarships, and tablets will be covered by benefactors.

Informing about the details of the project, the Beşiktaş Mayor Rıza Akpolat said, “With this project, we bring together families in need and citizens wishing to help those families through a platform. This is an important project. We are happy to bring this project to Beşiktaş and to scale up this solidarity. Beşiktaş is a district with a very high income and education level, where the number of households defined as needy seems to be very few or not. But as a result of our studies, we found out that the number of households in need, which was 118 earlier, increased to 228 thousand. It is estimated that this number is around 2,500 in total. While this is the case in Beşiktaş, this problem could be felt more deeply in other districts. I believe this project will be regarded as an example and this solidarity will spread everywhere. As the Beşiktaş Municipality, we placed unity, togetherness and solidarity at the center of our governance understanding. We strive to be with them in all matters that our citizens may need. We have carried out various projects since we took office. Our field solution team that we established recently has visited 93,540 households so far. We visited around 11 thousand shops and small businesses, public institutions and organizations. We visited each and every household in Beşiktaş. We met their mask and disinfectant needs. We conducted surveys to determine households in need. The data that we obtained from of the District Governorship regarding the number of the needy families in Beşiktaş suggested that there were around 118 such households. We detected as a result of the work performed by our field solution team that there were 228 households. This is the number of the households that personally stated that us 'I am in need'. We can see both from the phone calls reaching our call center and also from the notifications we receive from the social media that this number is almost doubled indeed, as there are citizens who cannot or do not say that they are in need.  We think that this number will increase 2 or 3 times as the pandemic conditions continue.”

Giving examples regarding their work, Mayor Akpolat said, “For the use of the households we detected, we established public stores where citizens and families in need are able to acquire their various needs including food, health, textile products and white appliances free of charge, using the public cards we gave them. Some credit has been allocated to their card so that they can do their shopping. We are also planning to launch a soup kitchen that will serve 7,500 people a day in Beşiktaş. We had promised that we would adopt a participatory governance approach in Beşiktaş. And the promise has been fulfilled.”

For detailed information: besiktas.ihtiyacharitasi.org