56 years ago, the late Vehbi Koç gathered together 205 business people, faculty members and intellectuals to promote education. In 1967, following a massive effort unimaginable considering the conditions of Turkey at that time, they established the Turkish Education Foundation to support the education of young people. They knew that a skilled new generation was necessary to develop this country, and that this could only be achieved through education. This courageous movement brought the Turkish Education Foundation to life through a spirit of solidarity.
The founders made the following call to our generous people that day.
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"We want to ensure that young people in our country, who deserve our interest and support and who want an education but lack the financial means, receive the help they need.
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To ensure equal opportunity, which is one of the measures to ensure social justice, we want every young person to have equal rights to educational opportunities,
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Even though free and compulsory primary education, which is constitutionally accepted as a duty of the Turkish state, has not been solved despite all its efforts since the establishment of the republic, and given that two-fifths of school-age children do not have access to school,
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While secondary and higher education is not only a public service, our special conditions and realities have always placed education on the shoulders of governments,
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For these reasons, we believe that it is necessary to launch an education movement, as it is the inevitable civic duty of business people, intellectuals and all our people to share the increasingly difficult and challenging tasks of the state, in an attempt to help and to take responsibility,
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We have established this foundation to secure the continuity of this movement and the integrity of its resources."