Peace Projects is a grant program launched by the GYV to support innovative conflict resolution and peace-building projects that focus on preventing, managing and resolving violent conflict and promoting post-conflict peace-building.

The Peace Projects program will provide support of up to $50,000 to projects that apply a broad range of disciplines, skills and approaches promoting peaceful coexistence through dialogue and reconciliation, fostering pluralism, good governance and freedom of belief, advancing social and economic development and environmental responsibility, and maintaining respect for human rights, gender equality and the empowerment of women.

The foundation has made an assessment of 1,179 projects from 107 countries, and organizers of 16 of these projects have been invited to İstanbul. Ten of the projects, from Palestine, Rwanda, Sri Lanka, Greece, Afghanistan, Australia, Philippines, Nigeria, Colombia and Peru, will be given Peace Projects awards, while the GYV will present its $50,000 donation to three projects in accordance with their development.

The GYV has been producing projects in various platforms in order to contribute to societal peace since 1994.

GYV Secretary-General Hüseyin Hurmalı said the foundation made a call to the relevant persons and organizations to present their projects in early May.

Hurmalı noted that Turkish-Islamic scholar Fethullah Gülen donated the honorarium that accompanies the Manhae Peace Prize he received last year to the GYV’s Peace Projects.

On Friday the GYV will also hold the opening reception of its “İstanbul Summit,” which will discuss the development agenda of the United Nations after 2015 from the perspective of women. This summit will begin on May 31 and end on June 1.

The reception will take place at the headquarters of the Zaman daily.