Become a Fundraising Ally

In order to support the organizing efforts of each of our Fellows, we are are looking to team them up with members of our network who will give strategic advice, make introductions to friends and colleagues, and serve as a mentor during this early, critical step of their journey.

The Objectives of the Fellows’ Campaign:

Each year, new Fellows lead campaigns in their hometowns to mobilize people and resources for Global Citizen Year. What are the objectives?

1. Build a base of supporters that will engage with and support the Fellow throughout his/her experience.
2. Mobilize others to support the Global Citizen Year vision.
3. Raise money for the Fellows Fund that provides support to those who would not otherwise have access to the opportunity. Over 80% of Fellows receive financial support from Global Citizen Year.

Dates

July 15 – September 1 Read more…

Global Citizen Year is proud to join, ServiceWorld, “an international service coalition of more than 300 non-profits, colleges, corporations and faith-based institutions, released a bold plan to meet President Kennedy’s goal of mobilizing 100,000 Americans every year – and one million over a decade – to serve abroad.”

“Compassion Across Borders,” by John Bridgeland, Harris Wofford, David Caprara. This piece has been cross-posted from the Huffington Post.

High unemployment, the Gulf oil spill, and mounting fiscal worries clouded our July 4th celebrations. Yet, one patriotic highlight in President Obama’s first year was bipartisan support of the Serve America Act, which expanded opportunities for Americans of all ages to meet urgent domestic challenges through community and national service. In the process, Americans who otherwise would have been unemployed are engaging in productive work, at low cost to taxpayers, to meet problems like the high school dropout epidemic. Similar efforts can expand volunteer service abroad.

As President Obama made clear in his first major policy speech to the international community in Cairo, Egypt, the world must unleash its collective imagination through social innovators, entrepreneurs and citizen diplomats to contribute to global development, respond to natural disasters, and initiate interfaith action to tackle preventable diseases like malaria. The moment is now.

Fifty years after John F. Kennedy’s call for a Peace Corps, we might reconsider our obligations to meet needs around the world. President Kennedy said that the Peace Corps would be serious when 100,000 Americans were serving abroad each year. Although the Peace Corps is America’s flagship international service program, today less than 8,000 volunteers are spread across 77 countries. Since 1961, America has sent and returned nearly 200,000 volunteers, a number significantly less than the millions Kennedy envisioned by his Peace Corps’ 50th year. Had the Peace Corps grown at the rate Kennedy envisioned, the course of our country’s foreign policy, diplomatic strategy and global awareness over the past 50 years would be very different.

Last week, ServiceWorld, an international service coalition of more than 300 non-profits, colleges, corporations and faith-based institutions, released a bold plan to meet President Kennedy’s goal of mobilizing 100,000 Americans every year – and one million over a decade – to serve abroad. The proposed Sargent Shriver International Service Act calls for doubling Peace Corps to 15,000 by 2015, lowering costs per volunteer, and forging partnerships with the hundreds of non-profits that have emerged since its creation. Doubling of the Peace Corps is a goal that both Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama have embraced.

Volunteers for Prosperity will tap 75,000 skilled Americans for flexible term assignments to work on international challenges Congress and many Presidents have made priorities, such as HIV/AIDS, malaria, and clean water. Global Service Fellows will enable Members of Congress to nominate top talent from their districts and states, as they do for the military academies today, to serve for up to one year abroad. Together with the Peace Corps, these efforts will meet John Kennedy’s goal of mobilizing 100,000 Americans to serve abroad each year.

The Service World plan focuses on multi-lateral partnerships and exchanges so Americans serve side-by-side with people from other countries, including in the United States. Under the plan, both skilled and non-skilled volunteers of all classes and ages will serve abroad for both long- and short-term assignments and veterans have specific opportunities to utilize their many skills in a civilian capacity. We believe an inclusive and mobile model of volunteering will contribute to the development of a new generation of global leaders, provide skills for U.S. citizens to compete in a global economy, increase international awareness, strengthen development, and improve the image of America abroad.

Volunteer service by people of all nations should become a common strategy in meeting pressing challenges in education, health, the environment, agriculture and more. By having national policies that engage more Americans in international service at every stage of life, we will be sharing our most valuable assets – the skills, talents and perspectives of our people – to make a significant difference in communities and nations throughout the world.

Cross-posted on the ONE Campaign blog HERE.

Recently, everyone from Seth Godin to Thomas Friedman has taken a dig at higher education. It’s a familiar argument these days as the traditional model becomes simultaneously more expensive and less relevant in preparing students to tackle the challenges of the 21st century  - let alone, to simply get a job.

So – what would a real world education for someone who wants to change the world look like?

I work for Global Citizen Year (GCY), a non-profit social venture that is redefining the path to global leadership by embedding high school graduates in developing nations during a bridge year before college.

Before we send our Fellows abroad, we host a US Training Institute that exposes our students to the theory behind economic development, leadership, and social innovation. We bring in Stanford Professors, Social Entrepreneurs, and business leaders.  It’s the workshop of all workshops.

But, theory is different than practice. Ian Zimmermann, a GCY Fellow who recently returned from the highlands of Guatemala where he was working in education, will tell you that real-world learning takes time and patience.  First, he says, it was about learning a common language and taking in the culture, building a new identity and creating trusting relationships. Only then was he able to understand the cultural history of the community and begin to identify what he could provide to the students of his school.

A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of spending a weekend with our first class of Fellows as they returned from the field speaking new languages, discussing how they earned the respect of their host communities, and describing how they carved out a role for themselves at their organizations.

Throughout our re-entry sessions, when our Fellows considered larger questions about poverty and development, their insights were nuanced and specific to the places in which they lived – with a newfound understanding that there really are no silver bullets in overcoming poverty.

After four days of discussion and reflection, there was a clear consensus: Immersion abroad is a pre-requisite for exploration and deeper understanding of any of our global challenges. To get at the root of any social problem you must first understand it through the eyes of the community.

The takeaway here?  As our Fellows approach college, they are doing so on a base of personal experience and curiosity.  The prospect of more schooling no longer feels like a drag – instead, it has come to feel exciting and practical.

I can’t help but think that this is the type of real world education that could prepare the next generation to take on the complexity of the global challenges we face.

For a glimpse of what our Fellows experienced during the past seven months, take a look at these short videos featuring – among others – Gaya teaching in Sebikotane, Alec giving a tour of his health clinic in Sangalkam, and Mathew working on a family farm in Gorom.  The final video is a collection of clips full of advice for future GCY Fellows.

Take a few minutes to click through a series of photos taken by our 2009 Fellows.

I just got in some video footage of our Fellows in Senegal that I thought you’d like to see. The videos I quickly put together follow Gaya and Mat through their villages and into their apprenticeships, where they have spent the last year exploring some of our most pressing global challenges in education and agriculture.  It’s quite a rough cut, but I wanted to get it out to you ASAP.

Enjoy and we’d love your comments below!

Gaya Morris working in Education

Mat Davis working in Agriculture

The video from Abby’s presentation at the recent HBS Social Enterprise Conference has just been released.  Abby was asked to answer the question, “Why I serve” to kick off the conference on the first day.  Here is her response – enjoy!

In his Thursday column, “Teach for the World,” Nick Kristof plugged Global Citizen Year as he stressed the need for Americans to embed in other cultures, noting that it would have a profound impact on everything from our foreign policy to our stance on the environment.  Here is an excerpt:

“Fewer than 30 percent of Americans have passports, and only one-quarter can converse in a second language. And the place to learn languages isn’t an American classroom but in the streets of Quito or Dakar or Cairo.

Here’s a one-word language test to measure whether someone really knows a foreign country and culture: What’s the word for doorknob? People who have studied a language in a classroom rarely know the answer. But those who have been embedded in a country know. America would be a wiser country if we had more people who knew how to translate “doorknob.” I would bet that those people who know how to say doorknob in Farsi almost invariably oppose a military strike on Iran.

(Just so you don’t drop my column to get a dictionary: pomo de la puerta in some forms of Spanish; poignée de porte in French; and dash gireh ye dar in Farsi.)

American universities are belatedly recognizing how provincial they are and are trying to get more students abroad. Goucher College in Baltimore requires foreign study, and Princeton University has begun a program to help incoming students go abroad for a gap year before college.

The impact of time in the developing world is evident in the work of Abigail Falik, who was transformed by a summer in a Nicaraguan village when she was 16. As a Harvard Business School student two years ago, she won first place in a competition for the best plan for a “social enterprise.” Now she is the chief executive of the resulting nonprofit, Global Citizen Year, which gives high school graduates a gap year working in a developing country.

Global Citizen Year’s first class is in the field now, in Guatemala and Senegal, teaching English, computers, yoga, drama and other subjects. Ms. Falik is now accepting applications for the second class, and in another decade she hopes to have 10,000 students enrolled annually in Global Citizen Year.”

The answer is most likely yes.

What is a bridge year?
A “bridge year,” sometimes referred to as a “gap year,” is a year between two phases of formal academic education, commonly the period between high school graduation and the beginning of college.  Global Citizen Year chooses to use the term “bridge year,” because we believe that a year of structured experiential learning will enable a student to more effectively bridge his or her high school and college experiences.

And, why?
Students who have taken a year “off”, enter college more mature, with new life experiences and perspectives that will make them better prepared to make the most of their college experience. At the same time, students are poised to contribute to their college community in new ways.  They enter school with renewed energy for academics and a clearer vision for how to focus during their time in college.

We’d recommend reading Gwyeth Smith’s article that ran recently in the Washington Post, in which he advocates for the majority of high school students to take a bridge year before college.  If you need more convincing, Harvard has recommended taking a bridge year to all of its students for the past 30 years.

Wondering if GCY might be a fit? Check out our selection criteria or meet some of our current Fellows.

How about the big concerns: safety and finances?  Take a look at our For Parents section, where we address these questions in detail.

On May 3rd, Global Citizen Year will be hosting a live Q&A discussion for interested high school students and current applicants.  We will stream the conversation live from San Francisco on the blog using USTREAM.

Details:

• Time: Monday, May 3rd @ 5:00pm (PDT)/ 8:00pm (EDT)
• Location: URL
• Who: GCY Staff and Current Fellows that just arrived back in the Bay Area

Sign up below and stay tuned! Read more…