Entrepreneur to sell Halide Edip Adıvar dolls for charity

Ece Çelik - ISTANBUL

A woman who makes dolls of female heroes from Anatolia has added Halide Edip Adıvar, one of the important figures of the War of the Independence, to her collection for the 100th anniversary of the foundation of modern Türkiye.

Renan Tan Tavukçuoğlu, an advertising and marketing expert, completed her master’s degree in the United States after graduating from Boğaziçi University in Istanbul.

In 2018, Tavukçuoğlu started her project called “Puduhepa and Her Sisters,” thinking that the budgets allocated by corporate companies as “charity” did not reach the right places.

“I wanted to initiate a change and to do a project to support life skills that are not in the school curriculums for girls between the ages of 6 and 10. I thought that rag dolls were the right tool to give these messages correctly,” Tavukçuoğlu said.

She stated that they came together with the Education and Social Support Foundation (TOÇEV) to provide scholarships to 155 girls yearly with the revenue from the dolls.

Tavukçuoğlu explained that this project also creates employment for women in several provinces like Bartın, Karabük, Izmir, Sivas, Ankara and Istanbul and that they established one of the production centers for the dolls in the quake-hit southern province of Hatay’s Antakya district after the deadly Feb. 6 quakes.

“When I went to the quake zone, we took advantage of the fact that these dolls could be made in tents. No tools are needed, you do not even have to know how to sew,” she added.

Within the scope of the project, each doll is sold together with a storybook about the life of that person. Tavukçuoğlu said that the second doll of the project was Prof. Dr. Dilhan Eryurt, the first Turkish scientist to work at NASA. Some other dolls included botanist Asuman Baytop and artist Gülriz Sururi.

The project’s latest famous figure is Halide Edip Adıvar, chosen to mark the 100th anniversary of the Turkish Republic.

Stressing that the project reached 3.5 million people in five years thanks to all its stakeholders, Tavukçuoğlu said they are expecting funding from 1,923 people for Halide Edip Adıvar’s dolls and books to be launched in October.