Our scalable and effective model: all in our 180 values!

They spell out

“Be

Thirsty

for

Deep

Peace,

Paz,

Paix,

Shalom,

Salaam”!

SUMMER 2010 UPDATE!

This summer, 52 Global Potential staff and students traveled on life-changing journeys for 45 days to villages in the Dominican Republic (DR), Haiti, and Nicaragua, as part of their 1.5 year long leadership training program with us. Our 31 youth and 5 junior staff members, all from inner-city neighborhoods in Brooklyn, the Bronx, Boston, Baltimore, and Batey 8, learned about the history, politics, environment, activism, and culture of entirely new places and people, while at the same time tapping into their own diverse backgrounds (Bangladesh, Belize, Guinea, Mauritania, DR, Mexico, Honduras, Colombia, Senegal, Puerto Rico, Haiti, Trinidad, El Salvador) as a source of strength.

This experience would not have been possible without our stellar group of volunteer staff of Social Workers, Teachers, and Community Development and Youth workers. We also ran a summer program in New York City for 15 youth, featuring Hollywood actor Renoly Santiago, which built up their confidence and explored their artistic talents.

Our youth were able to put the challenges that they face in their own lives and neighborhoods into perspective, and gain insight and confidence in learning about how to overcome these challenges and turn them into opportunities. Through advisory sessions with their staff, community forums, team reflection meetings, and personal blogging, the youth had unprecedented opportunities to reflect on their experience and their own process. Rather than spend their summers feeling bored and frustrated or getting involved in risky activities like drugs, gangs, or violence in their neighborhoods back home as many of their peers may have been doing, GP youth worked on: running energetic Daycamps for hundreds of local children, teaching English classes, building Latrines, painting Murals, doing workshops on sexual and reproductive health and HIV/AIDS, building community drainage and sanitation systems, spearheading community clean-ups, building homes and rehabilitating a church, and providing literacy classes.

You can listen to one GP youth’s perspective here, on National Public Radio, the Dick Gordon Show. Each youth also completed an educational internship with a local village leader, helping them with their work while acquiring valuable skills. With support from the Tribeca Film Institute, our youth produced 6 documentary films, which they are currently editing and will be using a tools for social advocacy. For the first time this summer, we had a former GP youth participant return as staff, and he did a phenomenal job! We also for the first time brought a youth participant who has worked closely with us over the last 3 years, from one of our partner villages in DR, to Nicaragua as a GP program participant, where he also excelled. Congratulations and thank you, Christian Ruiz and Samy Beneco Enecia!!!

Another first this summer was having a graduate student working in one of the villages with which we have a long-standing relationship, where she conducted ongoing evaluation of our impact there, as well as taught English classes and organized local youth to participate in our conferences and regional activities. We also had the opportunity this summer to explore new potential project sites in Haiti, Nicaragua’s Atlantic Coast, and in other nearby villages in the DR, and we had productive meetings with Mayors, government Ministers, and local and international NGO leaders.

The youth had the opportunity to explore together with local youth and community leaders the areas around where they lived, visiting historic cities and museums, beaches, rivers, lakes, mountains, bustling capital cities, and other isolated rural villages. Additionally, 18 GP participants joined 18 youth leaders from our partner villages in the DR, to spend 5 days in a local village in Haiti and exploring Port-au-Prince, while participating in a groundbreaking Open Space youth conference, along with 15 youth leaders from all over Haiti and another 15 from the local villages. Our GP and host village youth in Nicaragua joined 25 university students from Northeastern in a fascinating 2 day Open Space youth conference in Granada. And our youth in DR joined over 60 youth leaders from all over the DR and Haiti for a 3 day conference, to discuss and share views on topics ranging from Racism and Youth Violence, to Haiti’s Reconstruction, to Adolescent Pregnancy. Thank you to the JUMP Foundation for supporting our Conferences!

To date, 120 youth have participated in GP since 2008, and 76 youth have traveled abroad with our program. Four GP youth are traveling to Costa Rica and Guatemala this year through our partnership with Cross Cultural Solutions. Other GP youth continue to get scholarships, succeed in school, surprise their teachers and families with their new confidence and awareness, and stay involved in our program. Thanks to support from City Council in the Bronx and the Starbucks Foundation in Boston, and a contract with Comprehensive Development, Inc., we will be expanding our impact this coming year to serve even more youth, working with four schools in New York and two in Boston. For the first time this year, we held a fundraiser in Paris, France, and garnered an excited audience of supporters.

Way to go GP! We did it again, thanks to our amazing youth participants, families, staff, communities, and partners, as well as the philosophy that lies behind our work: Challenges Become Opportunities, and those who typically receive help learn how to help others, and therefore themselves. We are excited to have 6 new staff starting in our office and working with our youth at our partner schools, and to work on making our program better, and ensuring that more youth have access to these kinds of transformative opportunities.

Please follow along on our Blog, our Twitter, and like our Facebook fan page. Also, please consider making a donation to support our work (or by mail)—it is through the vision of our donors that our youth are able to have, and provide, this experience.

This summer was the best summer I ever had. I was able to work as a pharmacist, an enlgish teacher, and in the encache as a construction worker. Those were all things that would nto have happened ever. I met wonderful people and went through beautiful experiences and it is all thanks to GP. I wanted to let you know that the group GP highly interest me and this is a program that more students around Boston and the world should be apart of. So that being said, I want to give back. I want to keep being part of GP for the next possible years, as a staff. I want to help promote, fund raise, and recruit for GP. This was a life changing experience in so many ways and I would greatly appreciate if I could still be apart of it. – Marianny, Boston 2010 GP Leader

“I just want to thank you so much. My students who came back had what I want to call a spiritual transformation. The way they now connect to what we’re learning in class is so authentic…it can’t be learned in the classroom alone” – Social studies teacher @ IHSPH in NY

“The students had such an experience. Students like Stanley and Lesley have completely changed. They have been transformed.” – IHS Special Program Coordinator

I’ve learned so much about myself through this experience and I hopefully this experience is the eye opener I needed to live my life the way is supposed to be.” –Christian

“Global potential has been one of the best decisions I have made”. -Alicia, 2009 GP Alumni

April 2010 letter from Frank Cohn and Sarah Gogel, Co-Directors

April, 2010

Dear Global Potential friend,

Only rarely do minority youth whom are historically underrepresented have the chance to step out of their daily reality and confront privilege, power and impoverishment in a global context. Global Potential (GP) gives these youth this opportunity to transform themselves into catalysts of change. The cycle of poverty is broken through combining the untapped resources of marginalized youth with sustainable international development. GP fills a gap to empower hundreds of urban youth from low-income diverse communities around the U.S. with the skills and travel experiences to create positive change in their lives, their neighborhoods, and the global community.

GP’s model is to partner with front-line educators and urban schools in order to: create immersive and transformative experiences for participating youth; increase youth confidence and leadership skills; improve educational outcomes for low income youth; create concrete benefits for, and lifelong relationships with, the international communities where the young people work; and, to help youth identify and meet local community needs through their creation of social entrepreneurship projects. For many GP participants, field placements represent an intimate return to countries where their families have come from, or important explorations, across boundaries and assumption, into another culture.

Studies have long shown that service-learning and international exchange programs uniquely allow young people to grow as mature, self-confident leaders; to cultivate creative problem solving skills; to work and maintain cross-cultural relationships; and, to understand a sense of belonging in, and responsibility to, local and global communities. Such experiences also tend to ignite young people’s sense of purpose in academic engagement and confidence in setting and achieving positive long-term goals and outcomes.

But few programs currently exist for low-income youth to participate in a combination of meaningful cross-cultural exchanges, leadership development, and explorations of the world outside of the city. In response, GP is providing key services to lowest-income youth with quality educational opportunities to volunteer abroad – in solidarity with the members of communities they serve; to engage projects that confront inequity and poverty, head-on; and, to gain the skills, sensitivities, and perspective that will enable them to become leaders of positive change in their own lives, and in local and global communities.
Since our pilot in 2008, GP has worked with over 105 youth from low-income communities around New York (Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Washington Heights) and Boston, travelling with 44 of them (with 30 more to travel in July, 2010) in 5 groups on international service learning and cultural exchange projects. For 1.5 months, we go to rural villages called ‘Bateyes’ in the Dominican Republic (DR) and in Nicaragua. We document incredible transformations among our youth and in the local and global communities where they live and work.

In New York, GP has run its full program in Brooklyn* at two high schools: the Bushwick Academy of Urban Planning and the International High School @ Prospect Heights. GP has been awarded three contracts from youth-serving agencies around New York, allowing us to extend our program to GED students in Washington Heights, to truant youth in East New York, and to Transfer School students in Queens and Harlem.

In Boston, Massachusetts, 2010 marks an exciting year in which GP has carried out a pilot project with 12 youth, with the same model it has used in New York. We work out of one main Boston Public School, the Edward M. Kennedy Academy for Health Careers (HcA). Many of our youth participants come from the HcA as well as from the John D. O’Bryant High School of Mathematics and Science in Roxbury.

While abroad, our students engage in internships with local leaders, and as teams have successfully:

• Created murals, 2 municipal censuses, and community clean-up and HIV testing campaigns

• Constructed a classroom that fits over 120 students, 500 ft of sidewalk, and 2 community gardens

• Created 5 short documentaries about the Bateys (one of which was just accepted into the UN’s Plural Plus Youth Video Festival, to be screened in 15 locations globally), took family portraits, and wrote family biographies

• Designed and ran 36 daycamp sessions for a total of over 600 local children

• Planted 9000 corn stalks, 10,000 seeds for biodiesel, and did community reforestation

• Worked 120 hours at a local health clinic, 250 hours with the municipal government, and over 500 hours of tutoring and literacy classes

• Held over a dozen town-hall meetings in the villages, discussing comparative experiences of poverty, racism, and social exclusion, as well as sharing solutions

During the summer of 2009 in the Dominican Republic, our youth also organized an amazing weekend-long conference with 57 youth participants, including Haitian migrant workers, leaders from 3 different Bateys, our 18 youth and eight staff, and visiting delegates from partner organizations in Haiti and the DR. During this conference, funded through a partnership with the JUMP Foundation in Beijing, we discussed issues related to racial identity and migration.

In 2009, GP was pre-selected by UNESCO as a best practice in youth programming, was a finalist in the NYC Venture Philanthropy Fund, and was invited by the Western Union Foundation to submit a proposal. GP has received commendations from local governments in Brooklyn (Brooklyn Borough President’s Office and the Office of U.S. Representative Yvette D. Clarke) and in the municipalities we work in the DR.

We are founding members of the Building Bridges Coalition, a project of the Brookings Institute promoting international volunteering, and have been selected as a Diversity Outreach Organization by Cross-Cultural Solutions, a leader in international volunteer programs. GP’s Executive Director was invited to speak about the program to graduate classes at Columbia and New School universities, as a keynote address to the FuDan FuZhou Foundation, and on a panel on increasing diversity in international volunteering at the recent Partners of the Americas Conference in Washington, DC. In July 2009, GP’s Deputy Director Sarah Gogel was selected as a YouthActionNet Fellow by the International Youth Foundation, and field staff Sarah Gluck as a We Are All Brooklyn Fellow. Many of our volunteers grow professionally and personally through their work with GP.

Most importantly, GP participants continue to become more optimistic about their futures, find new strength and skills within themselves, and feel that their lives have purpose. They report improved self-esteem, leadership skills, physical health, and ability for personal reflection. Our youth attain improved educational outcomes, and at one of our partner schools, five GP youth received a full-ride scholarship from the Seinfeld Foundation after going through our program.

One of GP’s NY youth recently received President Obama’s “President’s Volunteer Service Award”. Three of GP’s youth were awarded a very prestigious prize (Plural +) by the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations and one of our youth was awarded the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival award for their documentary films they made while in the village in the Dominican Republic with GP last summer. Furthermore, several other GP youth were awarded $1000 from Ashoka Youth Venture for their Social Entrepreneurship initiatives. A number of other GP participants have gotten into colleges and received other scholarships.

A teacher at one of our partner schools said: “I really appreciate what GP is doing for our students. I think the transformations your program has created in some of them are beyond profound”. Other teachers observe among our participants an increased commitment to their education, leadership in the classroom, and engagement with subject material.

Three of our summer students, now at the University of Vermont, are beginning a GP club at their college, and two GP alumni are interning with us as staff and facilitators. GP has also started a student organization at Northeastern University in Boston.

GP is committed to evaluating the goals and transformations that our youth demonstrate throughout their participation in GP and years after. With your support we can continue to see groundbreaking results, extend and replicate our model to reach other schools in New York, Boston and other cities with traditionally marginalized youth of immigrant families (e.g. Seattle, Houston, Chicago, DC, Atlanta and Los Angeles). We will continue to work through a network of volunteers and a budget of $20,000 per 10 youth per year and half, including six-weeks in a rural village of a country most relevant to the overall diasporic communities of our youth.

The current cost of an intensive year and a half of training and field placement is approximately $2000 per young person. This nominal fee includes airfare, local transportation, insurance, homestay fees, some staff stipends, food on the road, weekend travel, and conference fees. The low-overhead is made possible through the all-volunteer nature GP staff, administrators, and front-line educators. Each GP youth participant is engaged in raising $300 dollars toward their participation, and, in the process, gain a greater sense of responsibility in their choice to participate, in addition to training on techniques of fundraising.

Our program is run 100% by volunteers who are professional social workers, educators, psychiatrists and designers. We also collaborate with graduate and undergraduate students from Columbia, NYU, Fordham, the New School and Northeastern University, a number of whom write their theses work about GP. We prioritize ongoing outcome evaluation, and are partnering with the Center for Social Development at Washington University to better understand our impacts.

Thank you for your time and consideration in being a part of this local and global youth and community change-making process. We look forward to hearing from you in the near future. To donate to Global Potential, please visit www.global-potential.org/donate or our umbrella organization, Globalhood, Inc., www.globalhood.org.

Sincerely,

Frank Cohn and Sarah Gogel