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	Ford Foundation’s #InequalityIs Discussion: Free-flowing Snippets of Mad, Sad & Data by Ruth McCambridge Non-Profit Quarterly   A few weeks ago, Darren Walker of the Ford Foundation announced an online exhibition of sorts on inequality, seeding the space with some videos. At the same time, he sent out a request for people to contribute to a Twitter “conversation” using the hashtag #InequalityIs.   We thought we’d visit there yesterday to see what the response was, but we never made it to the bottom of the long stream of civil society tweets—befittingly from all over the world. We encourage you to go to browse and participate yourselves.   The tweets speak to the variety of ways that inequality shows up in education, water availability, the environment, housing, policing and criminal justice, employment and wages, access to Internet and other technology, and reproductive rights, to name a few.   Of course, it is Twitter, so calling it a conversation is a stretch. It is more just snippets of sadness, data and commitment to change, but with a central energy flowing through it all. Visit the link below to follow #InequalityIs Visit the related web page
	Remembering through projects of dialogue Hrant Dink by Hurriyet Daily, AFP, agencies Turkey   15 April, 2015 (AFP/Reuters)   European parliament votes to recognise ''Armenian genocide'', urges Turkey to pursue reconciliation.   The European Parliament has backed a motion calling the massacre a century ago of up to 1.5 million Armenians a genocide, days after Pope Francis used the same term.   The parliament voted "by a wide majority", in favour of the resolution as tension grows over the characterisation of the tragedy ahead of the 100th anniversary of the 1915 killings of Armenians during World War I.   The parliament said it welcomed as a "step in the right direction" remarks by Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan and others "offering condolences and recognising atrocities against the Ottoman Armenians".   Urging Ankara to go further, the resolution "encourages Turkey" to use the anniversary "to recognise the Armenian Genocide and thus to pave the way for a genuine reconciliation between the Turkish and Armenian peoples".   It also called on Ankara to open "archives and come to terms with its past" while inviting "Armenia and Turkey to use examples of successful reconciliation between European nations".   The use of the expression genocide to describe the mass killings of Armenians by Pope Francis on Sunday provoked an angry response from the Turkish Government representatives who reject the term to describe the deaths.   "In the past century our human family has lived through massive and unprecedented tragedies," he said during mass in Saint Peter''s Basilica to mark the centenary of the Ottoman killings of Armenians during World War I.   "The first, which is widely considered ''the first genocide of the 20th century'', struck the Armenian people," he said.   While many historians describe the killings as the 20th century''s first genocide, Turkey continues to hotly deny the accusation.   In 2014, Mr Erdogan, then premier, offered condolences for the mass killings for the first time, but the country still blames unrest and famine for many of the deaths.   Pope Francis said other genocides of the 20th century were the Holocaust of 6 million Jewish people perpetrated by Nazism and cited the mass deaths in Russia under Stalinism. He also pointed to more recent mass killings in Cambodia, Rwanda, Burundi and Bosnia.   "It seems that humanity is incapable of putting a halt to the shedding of innocent blood," he said.   During a debate on the resolution in the European Parliament, conservative German member Elmar Brok said: "My own people committed genocides". He said there was "a moral obligation" to recognise and commemorate such massacres.   Bulgaria''s European Commission vice-president Kristalina Georgieva told the parliament the EU "fully acknowledges the significance of the upcoming commemoration as well as the divergence of views over this tragedy".   "Regardless of the words we use to describe those awful events, there can be no denial of their awful reality," Ms Georgieva said.   Armenia and Armenians in the diaspora say 1.5 million were killed by Ottoman forces in a targeted campaign to eradicate the Armenian people from what is now eastern Turkey.   Turkey takes a sharply different view, saying hundreds of thousands of both Turks and Armenians lost their lives as Ottoman forces battled the Russian Empire for control of eastern Anatolia during World War I.   Jan 2015   Remembering through projects of dialogue Hrant Dink, by Emrah Guler. (Hurriyet Daily)   It has been eight years since Hrant Dink, Turkish-Armenian journalist and editor-in-chief of the bilingual newspaper Agos, was assassinated by a young nationalist. Dink was an advocate of Turkish-Armenian reconciliation and wrote ardently about human and minority rights. At his funeral, two hundred thousand marched, chanting “We are all Armenians” and “We are all Hrant Dink.”   Soon after, a foundation was established in his name to foster and normalize the relationship between Turkey and Armenia, with the motto, “The border will first be opened in our minds.” The activities and projects at the heart of the Hrant Dink Foundation lie in furthering cultural dialogue and serving peace and empathy between the two cultures. Here is a look at some of the foundation’s projects.   The foundation’s most popular project is a film competition called Films About Conscience, which is much more than a competition. For the last five years, the short film project is offering an interactive platform for amateur and professional filmmakers to become part of a community and talk about conscience through film. The project/competition is inspired by Dink’s words, “The voice of conscience has been sentenced to silence. Now, that conscience is searching for a way out.”   Filmmakers are invited to upload videos of no more than five minutes to the project’s website. Visitors are encouraged to vote for their favorite films and publish comments on the films.   Between March 31 and Nov. 30, 2014, a total of 59 films were uploaded to the website, both from Turkey and abroad. The winners were announced on Dec. 10, 2014, World Human Rights Day. The winning films were selected by a jury including Mexican filmmaker Amat Escalante, Director of Istanbul Film Festival Azize Tan, actor and writer Ercan Kesal and writer Sebnem Isiguzel, as well as Dink’s wife, Rakel Dink.   The winning films are collected in a DVD, and recommended to international film festivals, while the first-place winner is awarded an incentive scholarship. You can watch this year’s winner, Burkay Dogan’s short “Sem” (Candle), on the story of a candle trying to flicker the burned-out wishes of others, as well as others on the project’s website (filmsaboutconscience.org).   Another project run by the Hrant Dink Foundation, in partnership with the Civilitas Foundation in Armenia and funded by the European Union, is the Turkey-Armenia Travel Grant. Hoping to increase direct contacts and to promote cooperation between the peoples of the two neighboring countries, the grant has been supporting the travels of 200 people between the two countries. Other supporters of the project include the Community Volunteers Foundation (TOG) in Turkey and the Youth Initiative Centre (YIC) in Gyumri, Armenia.   The grant requires specific goals and activities, such as partnership building and networking, cross-border cooperation projects, exchange programs, academic cooperation and joint productions of culture and arts, among others, from individuals and non-profit civic initiatives. You can check the Beyond Borders Turkey-Armenia website (armtr-beyondborders.org) for the visitors’ experiences and impressions.   Currently, one visitor is set to travel to Armenia to carry out archival research on the Armenian press during the post-genocide period as part of his PhD thesis, while another is going to interview descendants of the 1915 events, associations and institutions for a daily newspaper and later a book.   Coming to Turkey, a photographer will take photos of Armenian-Turkish mixed couples living in Turkey and another visitor will work on a project to create a public online map showing the Armenian heritage in Istanbul. Check hrantdink.org for more information on the foundation’s activities.   http://www.hrantdink.org/ http://www.vicdanfilmleri.org/?main
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