ABOUT the UKYG

Union of Kurdish Youth of Georgia

Yekîtiya Cahalên Kurd yê Gurcistanê

საქართველოს ქურთთა ახალგაზრდობის კავშირი

Logo of the UKYG

The main mission of our organization is consolidation and development of civic, personal and professional potential of young citizens of Georgia of Kurdish origin in line with development of tolerance and non-violent youth movement in the country and region.

Our organisation implements variety of educational, cultural and sport programs for youth. We also try to involve youth in media activism, dialogue with the decision-makers, as well as to the work with environment, gender equality, interculturality, social inclusion and tolerance issues. Please see detailed description of our activities attached bellow.

We outreached with our programs more than 2000 young people and approximately 3000 of children. More than 150 of these youngsters have been further involved in the programs of other NGOs and international organizations, including UN, Council of Europe and EU. We managed to create one of the permanently acting youth ethnic minority organizations in Georgia, which carried out its activities on the permanent basis. We have team of more than 40 volunteers permanently working with organization.  We have our own web-resources (please see below) and number of publications. We cooperate with Ministry for Youth and Sports, Tbilisi Municipal Council, National Parliamentary Library of Georgia, leading NGOs in Georgia and networks and organizations abroad such as UNITED against Racism, FARE, Minority Rights Group and promote their programs among our youth. We managed to organize several unprecedented and internationally important events for Georgia, such as First Festival of Languages, Days of Kurdish Culture in Georgia (after long break since 90s), European Action Weak Against Racism, White Ribbon Campaign (against domestic and gender based violence) etcetera.

Under support of Minority Rights Group we started to cooperate with UN Independent Expert on Minority Issues and UN Forum on Minority Issues, sending information on conditions of young people from our community and documenting human rights violations.

We already started to work with other numerically small communities to assist their members in promotion of youth initiatives, e.g. Assyrian, Romani and Ossetian communities.

For the long time this work has been done on volunteer basis, however now we feel that we are able to approach more important issues, which need wider interventions and that is why we decided to start to apply for grants ad succeed in the last and current years to receive first support.