Sof Dağı Sports Club

Our association is a sport club NGO which is connected to Gaziantep associations department and it is registered in sport branches by Youth and Sport Head Office. It is also accredited by national agency. The activities of our organization are divided into three areas that are mostly directed on children, youth and adults. These areas are sports, education and community development sector. Our daily activities in sports include: - water polo practicing; - swimming course; - participation in swimming contests; - scuba diving, jogging, trekking; - cycling training. In educational sector, our volunteers provide English language courses at the Montessori kindergarten and while regular classes for adults and youth. Monthly, we organize English movie nights for youth in our community. Within the community development sector, we are mostly working in the branches of social integration of the vulnerable groups (refugees), cross-cultural and cross-border cooperation. Currently, we are attempting to provide projects on human rights, community peacebuilding and development of entrepreneurship. For these issues our auditory is broad and includes not only youth, but senior people and vulnerable groups. During their activities, our volunteers are capable to involve innovative methods and technologies of work and present quite new quality and result. As one of such examples, our volunteers presently cooperate with the NGOs from Europe (Italy, Greece, Ukraine) and initiate own projects dedicated to the solution of social, legal and educational problems of refugees. Thus, in October 2016 our volunteer starts a pilot project, the results of which will be in opened access in Internet and our website. As our association members consist of the active people, our subjects of activity are varied and increase day by day. Our association has officially 35 members. The number has been more than 60 with the people who work as volunteer in our association. Our association gets into the act regularly in sport branches like swimming, water polo, trekking, cycling and biathlon which is the activity of special sportmen and Modern Pentathlon Federation in local community. In our swimming activities, we train the people who are between 6-60 ages young people or the people who feel themselves young in the branches swimming, water polo, biathlon. Our activities take place in the swimming pool in our city which is connected Youth Services Sport Provincial Directorate. We participate in the local and regional competitions actively. Our association has totally 580 active licensed sportmen according to the official figures of Youth Services in 2015. They are predominantly sportmen between the ages 7/20 in the water polo, swimming, trekking, cycling, biathlon which is a branch of the Modern Pentathlon Federation and the other related branches of Special Sports Federation. Our sportman ,Mehmet Mesut Elbeyi, has come in third in Europe in the Master B Ranking in the biathlon competitions of the Modern Pentathlon Federation. This is our biggest victory in sport. Our association organize 5 km. trekking for the Master group each Sunday. Our association has dibbled 250 saplings with the other active organizations in the Dülük Baba Forest Land which is in our city and has taken care of the 50 saplings. This is the responsibility of our association. Our Master group is interested in this activity. This group goes on trekking each week. Organic agriculture has an important place among our association activities. We do these activities in Sof Mountain and foothills whose distance to the Gaziantep city is 35 km. The name of our association is derived from this mountain. We produce organic fruit and vegetable in a 50.000 square meter field. Sof Mountain has a height between 1300 and 1450 meter. As Sof Mountain has a great height, it is the most suitable point for producing fruit in our city. It is the place which has the highest rainfall in our city. Especially tomato yields a good amount. This tomato is called as Sof tomato. As land structure is mountainous and our area has disadvantage in terms of water, we use drippage water system. That’s why, it provides advantage to us for irrigation. The central altitude of Gaziantep is about 800 meters. As Sof Mountain is in a high point, we carry out sport and agriculture activities in this area densely. As the oxygen amount is high, the fruits are so delicious. Pistachio, walnut,apple,olive, fig,apricot, etc. fruits are produced in Sof Mountain area and our association makes serious studies about this point. As our association is an association which was founded for help, we need a serious worforce to collect and distribute these products. We have achieved this volunteer need with the help of local people until so far. We give briefing and training once in a month to our members in our association. We gave the trainings like the importance of walking for healty life, correct breathing techniques,