Our paper presents findings from Sabancı University's gender awareness project: The Purple Certificate Program (PCP), a consciousness raising program which aims to introduce gender-mainstreaming into the Turkish high school system and curricula. 3500 high school teachers have participated in PCP over the last ten years, and 345 teachers have qualified for the certificate. PCP offers intensive two-day workshops in 17 cities, and offers a one-week certificate program to qualified applicants. The paper shows how PCP has worked as an example of effective change in gender awareness which works across differences by including multiple participants, audiences, and research approaches. The paper outlines the origins of the PCP as the institutional education part of the Women Friendly Cities United Nations Joint Programme. Due to the multi partnered nature of the initiative, the initial difficulty was to coordinate and harmonize the bureaucratic procedures of several state ministries, UN, and the financial supporter, the Sabancı Foundation. Another challenge has been how to form an educators pool with diverse qualifications to cover the multi-faceted demands of the certificate program which includes sessions on subjects as varied as gender and law, literature, science, the feminist movement and women's history, gender representations in text books, domestic violence and discrimination and human rights violations from a gender perspective, etc. Apart from these wider and more generalized challenges, the one-on-one experiences of contact with high school teachers, their local needs and problems have emotionally and intellectually affected our academics as well as program coordinators. On its tenth year anniversary, the project was celebrated by a book of oral histories from project contributors and participants. The paper argues that PCP has achieved most of its initial challenges but also identifies new fields for possible development. These include: one, work being done on a certificate program for students of School of Education who will soon join the education force; two, the development of a certificate for NGO applicants who work with/for disadvantaged groups in the educational system; three, a program to create gender sensitive education materials and pedagogical methods in the STEM, Social Sciences, Literature and Psychological Counselling fields in collaboration with high school teachers and university professors; four, activities which expand PCPs geographical spread into two other major cities in Turkey; and finally five, the development of two specialized board games to familiarize primary and secondary school students with elementary concepts of gender.

Alp, R., Sarı, B., et al. (2017). On Yılın Hikâyesi (Story of Ten Years). İstanbul: Sabancı University Press. http://www.womenfriendlycities.com/ http://www.sabancivakfi.org/en/search-result?searchInput=purple+certificate