My journey toward community, learning and system building began with my own years of searching for meaning, mentors, and tribes where I belong.
I am an adventurer in search of meaning, connection, and a tribe where I belong. While the search is still on, I built TurkishWIN, my sisterhood network as my tribe where I belong.
If you change countries, sectors, or personal inspirations, like me, you need a new network to learn and grow- every time you make a move.
Well, let’s start from the beginning! I am blessed with an eccentric family and a curious mind.
My family hails from entrepreneurs. As a child, Dad took me to the Grand Bazaar where he had his jewelry shop, handed over from my grandfather. I learned to sell gold bracelets and keep accounting and the shop in my summer holidays.
When I was 10, I used to save my pocket money and invest my savings in foreign exchange (Turkey was in a hyperinflation period then) by calling my father for the spot foreign exchange rates- established in the unofficial currency market in the Grand Bazaar. I knew there was no transaction fee and when I changed my investment currency, Dad would always roll up the investment amount- win-win!
In high school, my best friend and I designed school sweatshirts- for the first time ever in St. Georg’s Kolleg- and sold them to fellow schoolmates right from our classroom (with permission from the schoolmaster). I used the profits to cover my university application fees to the United States. It was a drop in the bucket but gave me the freedom to play around to apply to universities outside of Turkey and Austria- my backup choices.
Turkey will always be my home. In the diaspora, I lived with longing for home. This longing was one of the pillars of TurkishWIN.
My parents have no university education, but they instilled good education’s importance into my mind and heart. That said, they gave me the most important thing: confidence that I can be whatever I decide to be. Luckily, my parents did not interfere with my plans- they set me free. I fought hard to graduate from the Austrian St, Georg’s Kolleg, the London School of Economics, and Columbia Business School (CBS). Needless to say, I had to seek and find different mentors at different periods of my life.
In New York, I started my career as a research associate at the New York Stock Exchange, where women in finance were working on their golf handicap in social networking events, wearing their hair short, entertaining clients with their male colleagues in strip clubs, and had stay-at-home husbands (allow me some exaggeration please). On the upside, I learned what good research looks like, and published an article in the Journal of Finance. I loved my job and my managers (who are still my mentors) but I did not feel I belonged. Although it was a tough decision, I left the sector after 4 years.
When I was the COO of hakia.com in New York, you could count the number of women in industry events and in leadership positions in the technology industry. While navigating career twists with mentors and my CBS network, I was inspired by our mission to “search for meaning” and how technology could be an enabler. As I led the team to build the business, operations, and fundraising ground up, I understood what it takes to build culture and a super team. We competed with Google and lost to the mortgage crisis. Downsizing the operations surely made me more resilient.
When I returned to Turkey to work as the Deputy General Manager at Microsoft Turkey, I led the Developer Evangelism team and managed audience marketing for start-up, academic, and developer communities. Under my leadership, we launched Open Academy, Turkey’s first application development platform, and reached 74K students with 7.5MM minutes of training in 6 months. This was my first dip into learning communities and what it takes to run one!
My longing for my home, Turkey, steered me to NGOs in Istanbul, London and New York, to build a connection and make a difference. But it was hard to volunteer, make progress or scale our collective impact in Turkey.
I volunteered for other NGOs as well, my alma mater’s Columbia Business School Alumni Club of New York, to add meaning to my life. When I volunteer, I spend at least 5-10 hours per week in a very immersive way. But I quickly realized that I was missing something when I built connections around my ethnicity, gender, location, or profession.
I belong with people who make my heart sing to the tune of shared values, dreams and visions.
In my search for belonging, I realized what was missing, the moment I set foot in TED community and events. In 2009, I attended the TED conference in Long Beach, surrounded by smart and generous people from all walks of life. We were all there to be inspired and to make an impact on the world around us. Everyone was curious, waiting to learn and have that one takeaway from that conference week. The shared connection was the values we shared: curiosity, generosity, and accountability. I felt I belonged. At the time, the conference attendees were mostly American, Caucasian males. Of the 1700 attendees, there were a few people of Turkish descent. As you can guess, my former connection formula – search for people of my country, university, and gender- was out the door.
I became a TEDx organizer and switched all my volunteering time to help organize TEDxEast and TEDxGotham, the very first TEDx events in New York. We were lucky to have the TED team in New York help us in our effort. From 2009 to 2011, I was immersed in storytelling, curating, and coaching speakers for our events. I also attended TED events and met amazing people from my new tribe. I had a new belonging formula and was asking everyone about their dreams and future plans instead of their workplaces and their past.
I loved to help spread ideas worth spreading. But as an entrepreneur, I wanted to follow up on the action as well and that was a no-no for TED. I put my thinking hat on and combed through all the things that mattered to me to build something that mattered to me and my sense of community with all that I got: my skills, network, TED training, can-do attitude, and entrepreneurial mindset.
This centering reflection was at the seed of the winner idea: While my dad challenged me with new experiences and life lessons, I thrived with the encouragement of two amazing female role models. My aunt emigrated to the United States in 1950s (to divorce her husband) and is now a very successful entrepreneur with eccentric choices. My mom is a powerhouse, one of the most resilient women I know, restarting her work life at 44 and living her life with her choices. I knew that most of my zest and courage hail from these role models. I also know that not everyone has a supporting family, and our family culture is at times a burden we try to unload instead of a springboard of confidence.
I wanted to create an alternative for women seeking a community where they are supported with “yes-you-can” encouragement. I dreamed of a community where women would no longer feel alone because of their choices and ever-changing dreams and cities or industries. TurkishWIN was born from that dream of bringing amazing women with shared values and vision together. We, WINners, we’re going to build our legacy with collective action while having fun and learning from each other. TurkishWIN was going to be the community that I was searching for, a community where I felt I belonged, a community filled with women I was dying to meet from all over the world.
I learned that stories ignite hope, mentors encourage, learning circles make learning social, and networks empower.
The idea of the Turkish Women’s International Network (TurkishWIN) was planted in early 2010.
TurkishWIN is now a global community of open-minded and open-hearted women with cultural, professional, or family ties to Turkey. As a sisterhood collective, we build our legacy by lifting the next generation of Turkish women. In doing so, we meet other amazing women with a passion to change the ratio. We are no longer alone in this journey to build a gender-equal future.
In 2010, I was super inspired by Chris Anderson (one might call is Chris Anderson envy) and wanted to be like him, curating ideas, inspiring others, and building a platform that brings change.
TurkishWIN first started to organize TEDx-like events to curate inspiring stories of women. As a child, I was told stories of my aunt Asuman as a role model and I was very inspired. Later in life, she did her best to encourage and support me. I knew of the importance of role models.
Our inspiring role model videos were published – like TED- online and stories worth telling were spreading – for the first time in the Turkish community – in Turkey and the diaspora. We were bringing these hidden role model treasures to daylight.
Well, events are amazing gatherings and stories inspire us all to action. That said, we found out quickly that we had to add other engagement recipes to our busy community to build our social capital bonds in the network.
First, we introduced a mentoring program for our members to share experiences in 2011. Our mentoring program quickly included our newly launched youth leadership program, CampusWIN Academy Leaders, in 2012. As we facilitated experience sharing and encouragement through mentoring in our community, we also started to design and implement other mentoring programs in Turkey. We now have a steep goal of reaching 1 million mentoring connections for young women in Turkey by 2031.
Next, as the TurkishWIN collective, we started to bridge our social capital by making WIN-WIN connections. For example, we introduced KEDV’s MAYA to become Kiva.’s first local partner in Turkey & established a network connection. As a result, MAYA received a funding vehicle for micro-credit loans totaling over $1.2 million in funding to over 3 thousand women since 2011.
We knew we could do more as a community if we take collective action but organizing events or facilitating 1:1 connection did not scale when one does have limited resources. There are only 365 days in a year to host events and we did not want to grow our team with every new program.
All these adventures, experiments, wins and failures taught me that when you bring people together around shared values and purpose, and give them guidance on how to contribute, everyone becomes a change-maker.
In 2015, to scale our collective impact and legacy investment, I designed the first blueprint and led the launch of BinYaprak, a free, digital platform to help university-educated youth build careers they love in Turkey. Our goal is to share with our members up-to-date information about shifting careers trends, a positive – welcoming non-judgmental community to learn with and from, role models to get inspired by, learning tips for workshops- micro-coursework and networking made easy within a distributed network of experts, peers and other stakeholders to realize their potential at the workplace in Turkey.
The BinYaprak digital platform has now over 25 thousand members, features over 500+ role model videos, has over 1,000 volunteer mentors via the Million Women Mentors program, and organized more than 200 digital events that connected users across Turkey and worldwide with a digital reach of over 8 million users. This lifelong learning environment is practical and informal and offers a trusted, digital space.
BinYaprak is an ongoing experiment of the TurkishWIN community. We are tinkering with programs and the user experience to empower experts to share their industry, and competency knowledge in a fast and easy way- from Turkey and abroad- where everyone is a change maker. The engagement recipes that connect links for content and experts keep on evolving: a digital platform for networking, mentoring, learning circles, storytelling, forums, content discovery, and events. I feel like the chef in a kitchen that keeps on serving and co-creating new dishes with/for the community.
As I continue to build network-for-change systems that bring people together for shared values and purpose, I know we can engage more community leaders when we make the engagement tasks more granular and easier to fulfill. I also firmly believe that it only takes a few good people and a committed leader to build a network-for-change system.
Now, I’m an advisor to influential commercial and non-profit organizations.
My work on network for change systems, women empowerment and informal learning recipes set the foundation of the TurkishWIN platforms today. I advise international organizations like the European Bank of Research and Development and UN Women to help build a gender-equal future. As the Founder of TurkishWIN, I continue to advise and challenge our corporate members. I am now working on a few books to share my experiences and inspiring stories.