I remember walking into the New Global Citizens office and feeling entirely freaked-out. I was 15 years old and it was the first day of my new summer internship. While the office felt warm and friendly, the lofty goals plastered on the walls were overwhelming. As I gazed upon their posters, I soon realized that New Global Citizens wanted nothing less than to change the world by the power of youth. Who was I to think that I could play ball in their league?
You could say I always had a globally-oriented mind, but the tsunami of 2004 in Indonesia convinced me to take action. My friend and I realized that we ought to see if we could help out. In a spur of the moment decision, we decided to become Christmas tree de-decorators and donate our earnings to the Red Cross. Basically, we would charge people a small fee to remove ornaments and decorations from their Christmas trees. We set our goal at raising $500. We were both surprised and thrilled when we wrote the final check for $1,200.
I soon heard of New Global Citizens, and loved their youth and global focus: a rare combination among non-profit organizations. The mission of New Global Citizens is to mobilize young people in the United States to help solve the world’s biggest problems. They seek to motivate members of Generation Y to ask “Why does half the world live in poverty? Why don’t 1.2 billion people have access to clean water? Why do 1,200 children die every hour from preventable diseases?” They believe that young people are uniquely poised to tackle the world’s greatest problems and New Global Citizens exists to harness this potential.
Over the next two years, I watched New Global Citizens grow from a start-up non-profit to an established organization with a model for high school clubs across the country. Word was getting out about New Global Citizens, and when my friend Anna approached me in our junior year about starting our own club at Berkeley High School (in Berkeley, CA), I was more than eager to join.
We chose to focus our work on women’s healthcare delivery in Mexico. New Global Citizens linked us up with an amazing woman named Sandra Peniche, who is a fellow of the non-profit organization Ashoka. Ms. Peniche works to prepare doctors to better meet women’s needs and to train women to direct their own health care. She also created a coalition of public health professionals to prepare doctors to fight cervical cancer and improve their treatment of women. The coalition brings together representatives from civil society organizations, medical associations and government health services to create trainings and curricula for medical students and established doctors alike. Her main target group is indigenous tribes of the Yucatan Peninsula. With some further research, Anna and I discovered that while cervical cancer is the 12th leading cancer killer in the world, it is the first for women in Mexico. This kind of cancer is killing an estimated 300,000 Mexican women each year. To us, it seemed imperative to take action.
Luckily, New Global Citizens was extremely helpful. They provided our club with two intensive training sessions: one at the beginning of the year and one mid-way through. The first session focused on enhancing important skills including raising money, recruiting key members of the community, communicating “big ideas” effectively, and running a productive meeting. The second training session was an “advanced” course on similar material. New Global Citizens also offered us a project calendar and helped us create a timeline for the year. In addition, New Global Citizens provided our club with an action and training manual, reliable technical and project support from a Program Officer, a web page, and a regularly-evolving “menu of project options” designed in partnership with recognized leaders in the field of international development.
Following the New Global Citizen’s FACE plan, Anna and I began planning our Fundraising, Advocacy and Community Education strategies for the club, which we had entitled YALAH (Youth Advocating for Latin American Health). However, our first hurdle was to recruit members. Anna successfully sold the spirit of the project and soon we had ten warm bodies. As a group we finalized our goals. We decided to fundraise for and educate our community about Ms. Peniche’s clinics in Mexico by selling baked goods on campus, hosting a silent art auction, and sharing proceeds from a student production of The Vagina Monologues. Keeping with the general topic, we also decided to advocate for the new HPV vaccine in California. The vaccine, while extremely controversial, can prevent young women from ever contracting the HPV virus, which can lead to cervical cancer.
Besides being able to save lives in Mexico from my high school in Berkeley, California, I was learning how to be a leader in my community. From my experience at the New Global Citizens trainings, I felt comfortable leading a meeting and inspiring others to want to create global change. I also learned how to set my goals high, but to take baby steps to achieve them.
However, the greatest aspect of New Global Citizens is that I was never alone. While Anna and I were helping women obtain better health care and awareness in Mexico, students across the country were fighting poverty and ethnic prejudice in Romania. Through New Global Citizens, the clubs are able to share ideas, strategies, success stories, and friendships. This year, New Global Citizens has clubs in California, North Carolina, New York, Texas and Minnesota. Everyone has different projects that they create for their own clubs.
For example, the young women of Castilleja School chose to work on a project entitled Plant Read, based in India. The project wishes to promote adult literacy and human rights using the Same Language Subtitling (SLS) program, which makes reading practice an accidental, automatic and subconscious part of popular television entertainment at a low per-person cost. SLS refers to subtitles on film song programs in the “same” language as the audio. Thus, Hindi programs are subtitled in Hindi, Tamil programs in Tamil, and so on in every local language. The basic idea is that what you see (text) is what you hear (audio) and then the two reinforce each other. The power of SLS lies in the fact that it is covertly educational. No extra time, transport or money needs to be set aside, as reading becomes a home-based experience complementing other reading and literacy work.
The Leland High School students decided to work towards ending child mortality by financially supporting Children’s Town in Zambia. The Global Fund for Children Project assists area orphans and other children with their immediate needs, including food, shelter and medical care. The town then nurtures the children in a secure, family-like environment and provides high quality primary education to students who have dropped out or never attended school in the first place.
Getting involved was so easy, and absolutely anyone can do it. First of all, it is important to know that you don’t have to live close to New Global Citizens offices in San Francisco. You don’t even need to have a club in your high school. New Global Citizen clubs can be with any form of gathered youth, be it church groups, social clubs, community centers or high school clubs. For more information on how to start a club in your area, email [email protected] or simply visit www.newglobalcitizens.com.
Above all, if saving the world sounds as good to you as it did to me, please get involved. I have learned so much from my experiences and from the wonderful staff at New Global Citizens. They allowed me to learn about a culture very different from my own and to truly see the world from my new position as a global citizen. The staff is extremely supportive, and has been behind me every step of the way, not only teaching me how to set high goals, but how to achieve them as well.
At New Global Citizens they are big on inspirational quotes. So, I leave you with a thought to end on from Gandhi, “Be the change you wish to see in the world,” and hopefully everything else will fall into place.
