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.

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

Everyone expects American high school graduates to go directly to college. At the same time, they are also expected to know exactly what they want to study. It’s an unrealistic expectation – we live in a big world with lots of challenges and there are tons of possibilities. Global Citizen Year is an opportunity to break that mold and do something different – go into the world before college, use your skills to make a difference, and enter college with a stronger sense of yourself, meaningful real world experience, and a global perspective.

If you have trouble viewing the video, click HD (high definition) Off on the right-hand side of the screen.

We asked the Fellows to film their responses to a few questions to see what they thought about their experience so far.  Here is what they had to say, two months into their apprenticeships in Senegal and Guatemala.

A collection of videos from the US Training Institute (September 19 – October 1, 2009).

7 minute overview

Outward Bound
GCY Fellows participate in an all-day team building training facilitated by Outward Bound.

Center for Creative Leadership
GCY Fellows are asked to create an artistic interpretation of leadership.

Dr. David Abernethy on International Development (Part 1)Stanford Professor, David Abernethy holds a session on the fundamentals of international development. Topics in Part 1 include measurement, the environmental consequences of development, and how the American ethos of “change and progress” may be received by communities around the world.

Dr. David Abernethy on International Development (Part 2)

“Get a notebook, start a page, call it “questions to answer in college”, you will enter college not just with a sense of what you want to do, but a list of 58 questions to answer – You’ll be miles ahead.” - Professor David Abernethy

Joel Segre on Social Innovation and Design
Joel Segre presents on design and implementation challenges when aligning multiple stakeholders to deliver life effective malaria meds in Tanzania.

Joel Segre on “Product Design For the Other 90%”
Joel Segre holds a session with the GCY Fellows on product design and business models for social impact. In this session, each group of Fellows was given a product and tasked with calculating both the product’s potential for social impact and profitability. Each group then had to defend their placement on the chart.

More on the session from Fellow, Gaya Morris: During our session with Joel Segre on “social impact” (might have been called something else) we were given a series of photographs of innovative devices which have been invented to alleviate poverty in the developing world. Among them was a 100 dollar computer, reading glasses, a cell phone charging station, a bike that purifies water while petaling, and a portable irrigation device. We then debated where to place them on a graph which had two axes, one for social impact and one for profitability. In order to place each device, we had to think about the factors that in each case would enable or hinder the impact of the device. A purifying drinking straw for example was determined to be a complete mistake for two main reasons: it requires women to get down on their knees in a river bed which is undignified, and it can’t be used by infants which are the main victims of water-borne diseases. This device was on the cover of a design magazine. Removed from the realities of the developing world, any average designer here in the United States might not prioritize the dignity of African women when looking for solutions to their water problem, but it is an essential factor, and I think this is a perfect example of the insights that we will gain during the coming year, that will allow us to pursue a path of making real change in the world.

San Francisco Site Visits: IDEO, Kiva.org, Room to Read & Current TV

SlidePress cannot find the gallery with this id: fellows-reception

I could not describe the evening and its significance any better than Patrick O’Heffernan of Social Edge.  I have included an excerpt from his article on Social Edge below.

“Last week, when I pulled up in an old VW next to the walled compound where I was supposed to meet the young Americans preparing to work in the bush the power was out and the street was pitch black. But no problem. The hostess was prepared with candles and the meeting room and the lush topical garden flickered with dozens of tiny flames. Women in colorful robes and dresses and men in shiny suites milled noisily around an outdoor fire to keep warm as the hot day slid into a chilly night. Food was plentiful as the hostess had wisely ordered a kitchen truck with its own generator to serve native dishes.

The first night of Peace Corp volunteers in Africa or Asia?

No, it was a home in a suburb of  San Francisco and the event was the send off party for the first class of the Global Citizen Year Fellows who were going Senegal and Guatemala a few days later to live with families in a rural communities. They had recently completed 12 days of intensive training by youth development experts and social entrepreneurs on social innovation and sustainable development. Now they were ready to put it to work. They were the inaugural class of Global Citizen Year and they were going to change the world. And they will.” Read the article –>

Related post: US Training Video Feed

Abby presented the vision for GCY to the Pop!Tech conference in Camden, Maine. Abby was invited to the conference as part of the Social Innovation Fellowship. The Pop!Tech community is full of extraordinary people committed to powerful ideas and innovative projects that are changing the world.

Watch the video of Abby’s presentation here.