UNESCO Chair on Gender Equality and Sustainable Development organized a one-week international summer academy on “Women’s Empowerment for Sustainable Development” in 2019. This program aims to respond to the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal 5 focusing on gender equality and women’s empowerment. It will bring together leading academics, UN and GREVIO experts, and femocracts to share with the participants their academic and professional knowledge and experience. The seminar curriculum will have short courses. The courses will be designed as intensive workshops and discussions to stimulate innovative strategies considering country-specific and global challenges. They will include the latest research outputs, facts & figures, best practices, and analysis of women’s empowerment and gender-based discrimination.

This Summer Academy targets the international audience of potential women leaders – particularly young politicians, civic society representatives, academics and professionals.

Global Learning Certificate: Leadership, Sustainability and Social Innovation in 21st century program is 6-days long online learning journey developed by the Office of International Programs with the collaboration of leading faculty members at KU and professionals in the field.

Students participating in the program will embark on a learning journey where domains of personal well-being, decision making, social innovation, sustainability, future of work, and conscious leadership will intersect each other.

KUGlobalAid is an international service-learning program for Koç University students, working to build awareness and solidarity in the world. Through a global, humanitarian, and need-oriented perspective; KUGA seeks to assist the world to improve itself. In line with the necessities of the 21st century in which we face complex and interrelated problems, our main motivation is to create social impact using the tools of social entrepreneurship, human-centered design, and sustainable building.

The University Innovation Fellows (UIF) program empowers students around the world to become agents of change in higher education. Fellows create opportunities that help their peers unlock their creative potential and develop the design-centered mindset required to take on complex challenges in today’s world. The program is run by Stanford University’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (d.school). Since 2017, each year a cohort of students are selected among Global Learning and Leadership for Sustainability Track Program as Fellows. Students go through a 6-week online training program. After completing the online training, they attend the Silicon Valley Meetup in March, where they connect with one another and build on the learning from the online training. Fellows receive year-round mentorship and represent the program and their schools at global conferences and events.

Dalai Lama Fellows awards highly competitive, yearlong Fellowships works on a project from selected universities and colleges worldwide. Fellows design and launch ambitious mentored Compassion-in-Action project. Dalai Lama Fellows learn that cultivation of patience, tolerance for ambiguity, listening to find alignment, resilience in the face of things not going as expected and allowing solutions to generate from a place of openness and humility are what make for exemplary leadership.

In December 2014, Koç University has become a partner of Dalai Lama Fellows program and every academic year a selected Koç University student who runs a community impact project is granted a year-long Dalai Lama Fellowship.