Support criteria

What groups receive how much money from us?

Er-Fahren offers grants for group trips for young people, particularly school groups of all ages, but also non-school groups and groups of trainees on educational leave. Every group must include a reasonable number of people whose families originally came from Turkey. It is particularly important to us that girls take part in these trips.

We sponsor up to forty participants from one school or organization. If several groups apply from the same institution they have to share the grant.

The maximum rate we offer is € 335 per participant for a three-week trip and € 310 for a two-week trip. Groups are of course free to reallocate this money internally as they see fit — some participants may need less, others more.

The funding we supply is only meant to cover the difference between the sum of the participants′ contributions plus any subsidies from public or other sources and actual need based on a cost estimate. Should there be any money left over after the trip it must be returned to us.

Since teachers' travel costs are now covered for class trips, we only sponsor chaperones if they are not eligible for a subsidy and if there is no more than one chaperone per ten participants. We also provide funding for one additional teacher for elementary school groups (one for the whole group). This funding must also be applied for and is granted in the same amount as for participants.

It is a good idea to have Turkish-speaking chaperones accompany the groups. Former participants also make excellent chaperones.

When groups come together with a partner group from Turkey at the Afacan meeting center, we pay for the Turkish group′s bus travel costs to Afacan as well as their stay in Afacan plus half or full board (depending on the application).

What groups took trips and when?

  PDF Address list in PDF format (in German)

How much money have we distributed to how many groups/participants?

  Funding statistics in PDF format (in German)

What kind of trips do we sponsor?

Er-Fahren sponsors trips designed to allow participants to experience the diversity of life in Turkey and to gain an understanding of Turkish educational, living, working and social conditions as well as the culture, history and politics of the country.

Participants should experience Turkey and not just be "shown" Turkey. Three weeks is an appropriate amount of time for this; two weeks is the minimum. We do not provide funding for vacations or conventional educational trips. It is important to us, for instance, that high-school groups come into contact with a variety of people, not only educated people from secondary schools or universities.

We know that parents often speak of the beauty of the tourist centers along the Turkish coast and that young people fantasize about a trip to the sea with its beaches, sunshine and nightclubs. Some group leaders support this perspective because they believe that the young people will gain a "good impression" of Turkey by being tourists, or because they fear that difficult, uncomfortable situations will only strengthen latent prejudice. We have a different perspective — and the evaluations of the Turkey trips we′ve sponsored clearly confirm our view in a remarkable way.

See also:

  Report from the Joliba e.V. 2015, 2016 (Turkish | German)
  Reports from project participants in PDF format (in German/129 KB)
  Report from the Refik-Veseli-Sekundarschule 2013 in PDF format (in German/1 MB)
  Report from the Otto-Wels-Grundschule 2014 in PDF format (in German/223 KB)
  Report from the Jugendgruppe Alte Feuerwache 2014 in PDF format (in German/76 KB)


There are also two documentary films by the Berlin-based filmmaker Rain Kencana:

Yolda 1 (2009, 30 min.): Social pedagogy students from the Pestalozzi Fröbel Haus on a work trip in a Turkish village.

Yolda 2 (2012, 89 min.): A sixth-grade class from Berlin-Kreuzberg spends two weeks in Afacan (2009) where they meet children from a Turkish school.

The DVDs of both films can be ordered for private use from the Foundation.