Founder of W20 at the Summer Peace Summit
Peace 50 community brought together active, powerful, and wise women from 14 countries. This summer, they met at the Summer Peace Summit in Brussels in order to discuss issues related to preservation of peace and development of the world, exchange ideas, and talk about cooperation. Every participant of the Summit told about her activity and shared her experience and accomplishments. Gülden Türktan, Founder of Women 20 (W20), emphasized that maintenance of peace is the priority task that can be addressed only through joint efforts of different countries.
Gülden Türktan – Founder and the First President of the W20, Chairperson of the Board of IWF Turkey, former President of the Women Entrepreneurs Association of Turkey (KAGIDER)
W20 was established in 2015. The organisation’s activity is aimed at combined efforts of women from G20 countries at the international level for full-fledged realisation of gender priorities. Dr. Türktan is convinced in the following: today, it is necessary to ensure that women are represented in all sectors of social life and have their voices heard in the executive roles. This will make it possible to improve the world and contribute to its sustainable development.
“Men and women have completely different attitude towards wars and sustainability. For men, as a rule, it is important to win. But for women it is important to prevent casualties and stop the conflicts”, explains Gülden Türktan.
She came to such a conclusion when she was working in a company with predominantly male staff and from reading the research on the subject.
In 2015, Dr. Türktan and her team managed to do the impossible: they contacted many countries including quite conservative ones and started a fruitful collaboration on women’s empowerment.
Women 20 annually hosts summits in different countries and online conferences in addition to carrying out a number of projects.
Gülden Türktan emphasizes that preservation and development of peace and women’s empowerment are global tasks that can’t be addressed in short time and alone. It is important to be patient, learn to listen to and hear one another, and work in a big global and collaborative team.
Annual change of presidency is one of the W20 and G20’s successful practices. Until today, the organisation’s president didn’t manage to raise money and it is not possible to influence the presidents from outside. Throughout the one year term, the Presidents very actively serve their presidency obligations, and then transfer the position and the title to a colleague from another country.
Dr. Türktan believes that global peace is when people from different countries hold one another’s hands and feel united. Humanity is safe when there are no wars. Only in such conditions society can freely develop and can live happily while positively contributing to the prosperity of the world.
Wars bring many material and spiritual losses. People not only die in armed conflicts: those who survive lose spirit and many of their best human qualities.
Gülden Türktan is convinced that women can prevent conflicts by joining their efforts.
Studies show that women are thriftier than men are. They try to build up savings and preserve and improve what they have.
According to Dr. Türktan, today, many organisations and separate people carry out hard work aimed at preservation of peace on the planet. They do not do that in the pursuit of profits but they sincerely wish to provide the rising next generations with a better future. It is important that they start uniting their efforts, which makes their work more productive. Peace 50 platform became one of the effective tools for collaboration in this field. Gülden Türktan believes that P50 community has much work to do and this work will certainly bring positive results.
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Viktoria Yezhova, news agency of the Eurasian Women’s Community
Translated by Nikolay Gavrilov
Source: http://eawfpress.ru/en/g-lden-t-rktan-peace-is-when-people-feel-united/