Ali Güray Yalvaçlı, Founder of Imece Initiative

Yalvaçlı began organizing community aid efforts in Izmir in 2014, before shifting the organization's focus to the Syrian refugee crisis the following year, as displacement in the Çeşme and Torbalı districts grew. What began as informal aid distribution to a small number of families has grown, according to international press coverage, into structured programs reaching thousands of displaced people across the region.

Under Yalvaçlı's leadership, Imece established Imece Village in Çeşme — a community and education hub running tent-based schooling for refugee children who had previously had no access to formal education, alongside language and mathematics instruction for children aged 7 to 12. Hürriyet Daily News covered the program directly, with Yalvaçlı describing how children in the program's early tent classrooms would arrive in their best clothes, eager for the Saturday sessions.

Yalvaçlı also led development of the Solar Age project — a solar-powered charging device designed for refugee camps and Aegean Sea crossings — and partnered with Barefoot College to train refugee women as solar engineers, giving them both a technical skill set and an income source.

In coverage by The Borgen Project, Yalvaçlı has explained that Imece's founding goal was a community free of political and religious dividing lines, so that support would never be distributed based on someone's background — a principle that still shapes which communities Imece serves today, well beyond Syrian refugees alone.