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.

Why our model?

According to Alan Krueger, a leading Economist of Education from Princeton, test scores decline drastically in the fall for students from low-income families, although this is not the case in the spring. Krueger attributes this to the “summer achievement gap”, which suggests that summer learning and enrichment greatly influence student success in school. Programs like GP are a deciding factor in building human capital through education, as students are immersed in an enriching summer curriculum built to increase student commitment to school for years to come. We invite youth to undertake a global search for meaning and possibility that nurtures critical thought, analysis, creativity, and literacy, among other skills.

Approach, goals and vision

Global Potential’s philosophy is rooted in the idea that all youth can empower one another to transform their own communities. Youth are entrusted with the responsibility of identifying a need in their own community, developing a plan of action (social venture) to address this need, and then actually implementing the plan. This is accomplished first through intensive educational workshops, social entrepreneurship and life skills training, and a formative international summer service homestay in a rural community in the Dominican Republic and Nicaragua. Upon return, the students receive additional mentoring from Global Potential staff to implement their action plan for community change.

The program draws its strength from many sources, including strong local and international partnerships, diaspora community support, a comprehensive and sustainable model of youth and community development, and an action plan rooted in both social entrepreneurship theory and critical pedagogy. Global Potential is unique in its vision of mutually enhancing and sustaining community development across cultures. In this sense, it seeks not only to provide underserved New York City and Boston youth with a formative summer experience, but to actually effect long term social change within the international host site (Batey 7, Batey 8, Cuchilla, and Los Blocs in the Dominican Republic and el Barrio Maria Jesus Olivas in Nicaragua). GP youth and youth of the Dominican Republic and Nicaragua are collaborators in a reflective process of shared growth and renewal directed at both socio-economic development and justice.

This year, Global Potential’s 20 NYC youth from the International High School @ Prospect Heights and Bushwick Academy of Urban Planning and 10 Boston youth from the Edward M. Kennedy Academy for Health Careers in the Fenway neighborhood and the John D. O’Bryant School of Math and Science in the Roxbury neighborhood will spend 6 weeks immersed in materially poor but spiritually vibrant rural communities. For the students and community, the structure of the stay includes:

- homestay with a local family – community infrastructure projects – women’s enterprise projects (funding from WorldVision and IDDI) – internships with local leaders in a field of the student’s interest (education, development, health, sanitation, agriculture, engineering etc.) – development and implementation of a summer day camp for local youth (organized by students and facilitators) – Community town meetings on relevant local social issues, like racism and poverty – Evening reflective group meetings with GP youth – Classes/workshops led by a GP facilitator on key development and justice issues related to our work in the Batey – Ethnography and interview project of community members by GP youth – Documentary project – Journaling and blogging