Our Mission and Vision

Our mission is to provide urban youth from low-income communities with the skills and perspective that enable them to effect positive change in their lives, communities, and the global community, through engagement in leadership training, social entrepreneurship, international cultural exchange and service learning.
Our vision is that Global Potential (GP) empowers low-income urban youth aged 16 to 25 to create positive change in their lives and communities. With GP, “Challenges become Opportunities,” and the philanthropic process is turned around: those who might typically receive help, learn how to use their own strengths and life experiences to help others and, in turn, themselves.
For 12 weeks, youth participants engage in a social entrepreneurship and leadership training program run at their high school, where they gain skills and knowledge that will prepare them to live and volunteer for six weeks in a rural village in a developing country (where at least half the students have a cultural background). This fosters increased global understanding and tolerance among communities and youth who would not normally interact, and improved ability for the youth to put their problems into context and discover solutions.
With improved skills to negotiate across cultural divisions, and having learned how to integrate problem solving in real time situations, the participants return to their diverse local communities and create culturally-appropriate social enterprise ventures, in partnership with Ashoka Youth Venture, to address needs they have identified—becoming catalysts for local social change.
Global Potential is developed and supported by Globalhood, Inc., an innovative multidisciplinary project incubator, and is projecting to initiate its pilot project in February, 2008.










