It’s time to start recruiting for 2011

Global Citizen Year will be coming to the following areas this fall. You can sign up below to bring GCY to a high school near you*. If we aren’t coming to your region, contact me at david@globalcitizenyear.org to learn how we can put your town on the map!


View GCY Recruitment and Organizing Tour 2010 in a larger map
Global Citizen Year 2010 Fall Recruitment Tour

How to bring GCY to your hometown

Step One – Take a peak at the map and travel schedule above.

If GCY IS scheduled to be in your region this fall

1. Add an area high school* to the map by leaving me a short note below.

If GCY IS NOT scheduled to be in your region this fall…bring us there!

1.) Discuss a future visit and ways you can get involved by leaving me a short note below.
2.) Share our one pager with others in your area (LINK). Generate interest from at least 3 schools in the area and we’ll be there!

Step Two- Connect Us!

Do you know a high school teacher or administrator who would be interested in GCY? Excellent! Share our one pager with them (LINK) and introduce us.  If you “cc” me on your correspondence (david@globalcitizenyear.org) I will be sure to follow up.

*While our primary visits are to high schools, we would be thrilled to visit any youth organization or college access program to share the GCY experience with students.

Become a Fundraising Ally

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…

Compassion Across Borders

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.

Tags: partners, service, ServiceWorld

Learning to change 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.

Tags: higher education, ONE Campaign

Founding Fellows are back

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.

Tags: Fellows, videos

GCY Fellow Slideshow

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

Tags: photos

Video Footage from Senegal

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

Tags: videos

Abby Falik presents “Why I Serve” at the 2010 Social Enterprise Conference at Harvard Business School

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!

Tags: GCY News, Harvard Business School

Abby Falik on Case Foundation blog advocating for bridge year

Cross-posted from the Case Foundation Blog

Headlines remind us daily of the challenges faced in our interconnected world.

The problems are enormous and complex – climate change, conflict, extreme poverty – and the consequences of not addressing them are shared. Yet few Americans have had personal experience with life beyond our borders. Only 10% of Americans speak a second language and fewer than 30% hold passports. Given these realities, how can we expect our country to address global problems when so few of us have seen the globe?

Here’s one answer, and it only takes a year…

A global “bridge year” is a year of structured international service between high school and college that gives young people the opportunity to understand another culture, learn a new language, and gain first-hand insights about the causes and consequences of global poverty. Its roots are found in the gap years that have traditionally taken youth from the UK and Australia around the world. Those roots have taken seed and been expanded to create substantive academic and practical learning components aligned with the preparation, knowledge, and skills that colleges and universities seek in their best applicants.

In his new book, Half the Sky, Nicholas Kristof of the NY Times even went as far as advocating that universities make such experiences a requirement. Colleges and universities are increasingly in agreement. For decades, Harvard has encouraged its admitted students to take a year off before enrolling, and last year Princeton University instituted a program through which up to 10% of their incoming class will have the opportunity to engage in a year of international service before even setting foot on campus. And to sweeten the deal, Princeton picks up the tab.

Why the surge in high-profile interest? The benefits of a global bridge year couldn’t be more clear:

• The National Research Center for College and University Admissions estimates 50% of students switch majors at least once and take an average of 6.5 years to complete degrees at 4-year institutions. A global bridge year enables incoming college students to clarify their academic and professional interests and better focus their education.
• On an individual level, a global bridge year not only promotes greater confidence, independence, and maturity, but the experience can also foster sustained civic and philanthropic engagement in communities at home and around the world.
• On a societal level, employers are clamoring for high school and college graduates who are actually prepared for the rigors of 21st century jobs, and four million people between the ages of 16 and 24 are unemployed. Just as national service may help to ease unemployment, as John Bridgeland states, so too can international service equip the next generation with the knowledge, skills and experience needed to help America remain competitive in today’s global marketplace.

The initiative I lead, Global Citizen Year, is training a national corps of high school grads and supporting them in apprenticeships in Africa and Latin America during their bridge year before college. But our vision reaches far beyond our current program. Ultimately, we envision a world in which a global bridge year is the norm – not the exception – for young Americans. We envision a day when every graduating high school senior has the opportunity to spend a year before college living and working in a community in another part of the world. Only then can we ensure that the next generation of American leaders has a life-long commitment to service, the fluencies needed to communicate across languages and cultures, and the ability to provide innovative and effective leadership to address the most pressing issues of the 21st century.

The idea is simple, but the potential is revolutionary: the challenges we face are increasingly global, so let’s give emerging leaders the opportunity to experience the world during the formative transition to college, equipping them with a global perspective that they will carry throughout the rest of their lives.

Given today’s headlines, we can’t afford not to.

Tags: bridge year, case foundation, gap year

GCY in NYT: Kristof’s “Teach for the World”

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.”

Tags: media, New York Times