This week, students from 13 countries and more than 50 different schools came to Northwestern to trade ideas about international development and social entrepreneurship at the Global Engagement Summit (GES).
The summit, taking place in Norris, continues through Apr. 11. Delegates and staff members attend workshops and a career fair and receive one-on-one mentoring for social change projects.
The summit began Wednesday evening, Apr. 8, with a banquet and keynote address from Nathaniel Whittemore, who founded GES in 2005. An address, open to the public, by Premal Shah, president of Kiva.org, will cap the summit on Saturday at 4 p.m. in the Louis Room.
“We’re building a community of students who are committed to taking action,” said Rajni Chandrasekhar, a Weinberg senior and co-director of GES. “Whatever these outcomes might be, we want to encourage social mightiness and teach that it isn’t an abstract thing to create change.”
The delegates to the conference applied for spots in November and December of 2008. Applicants submitted proposals for social change projects, which ranged from a documentary to tuberculosis-prevention ideas to a social justice t-shirt company.
“A lot of people come up with pretty creative ideas,” Chandrasekhar said. “We have people who have only an idea, and we have people who have already started their own [non-governmental organization].”
Delegate Syed Kamal, who goes by “Onik,” is a sophomore at Earlham College in Richmond, Ind. Kamal’s project goal is to open community schools with programs for arts and leadership in Bangladesh, his home country.
“The whole theme [is] social motivation and development of arts,” Kamal said. “The artistic skills of young people will be tapped in the right way, creating a community of leaders.”
Kamal said he hopes to meet like-minded people at the conference who can help with his project.
“People from all around the world who are motivated to make change are here,” he said. “I think it’s brilliant to see what young people can do.”
Illya Symonenko, a delegate from Ukraine, said he nearly did not make it to GES. Symonenko, a sophomore at Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, decided to apply to be a delegate just before the extended application deadline.
“I got into it at the last moment, one day before the extended deadline,” he said. “If they had not extended the deadline, I wouldn’t be here.”
Symonenko’s project, called CACTUS—Community Action Ukraine Style—is a 10-day social responsibility seminar for young adults in Ukraine. Although his project is already running, he said he hopes to hear new ideas to improve the project’s framework.
The GES staff is 100 Northwestern students—nearly twice the size of last year’s staff, according to Chandrasekhar. Molly Lister, GES co-chair of content, headed one of the 13 teams that make up the staff.
“[The content team is] responsible for the entire curriculum,” said Lister, a Medill sophomore. “Coming up with workshops, finding people to facilitate them, organizing the keynotes and just planning the day-to-day schedule.”
Lister, who spent a gap year working on volunteer social projects in eight different countries, said she wanted to work with GES even before coming to Northwestern.
“It’s a great experience,” she said. “I really love connecting with people interested in the same things I am.”
These connections, said co-director Emily Eisenhart, are one of the goals of the summit.
“I have friends all over the country and all over the world,” said Eisenhart, a Weinberg senior. “It’s very cool—kind of makes a big, wide world small and accessible.”
Eisenhart said that GES is different from other conferences because it does not focus on a single subject and the delegates come from a wide variety of backgrounds.
“GES is focused in that it brings change projects, but not focusing on just social entrepreneurship,” Eisenhart said. “It’s new, different.”