GIN student teams develop GIN projects within their self-identified passion and community through dialogue, interviews, research, the study of local-global issue systems and empathetic implementation of local-global solutions.  Student teams are expected to create a sustainable GIN project based on community identified needs and issues while integrating and combining the following thinking frameworks to effect change: historical methodologies, cultural perspectives, empathetic action, as well as sustainable design and systems thinking.  Students formulate their own understanding, expression, and sustainable implementation of local solutions to global problems.

Participating school communities are encouraged to empower students to take the lead and engage in GIN activities throughout the school year to include: GIN clubs or classes, local projects in partnership with your community, as well as active participation, contribution and collaboration with local, regional and global GIN networks vis a vis virtual interaction on the website as well as attending local and regional GIN conferences.

A Global Issues Network (GIN) Conference brings together global citizens who are addressing local-global issues within local-global systems with empathetic and equitable sustainable solutions. Students in middle and high school from more than 100 nations on 5 continents have presented their GIN projects at both local and regional Global Issues Network Conferences hosted by schools around the world.  Regional and local conferences are growing as student leaders respond to their “Call to Action!”

Students Leading the Way

GIN Conferences are student-led gatherings supported by school communities across the globe. We challenge students to design every element of the conference as an interactive and sustainable conscientious living, cultural, and learning experience. Students integrate climate change activism, local-global community building, design and systems thinking: from outreach to local and regional schools, to the conference carbon footprint calculation and offset, to art as an expression of activism, to food justice and the mindful meal, to youth led and facilitated workshops focused on leadership, collaboration, sustainable solutions and learning to be a changemaker; all of this has and continues to grow a culture and community of global citizens dedicated to empathetic action.

All Participating Students Present & Share Their Work

Every student project team crafts a workshop to present to their peers. Each student led workshop delivers a message based on their passions, strategies, solutions and challenges within the process of developing a project in partnership with their local community.  This enables students to experience what it means to be an expert, a teacher, a student, and most importantly an empowered collaborative leader making a difference in their community.  This student empowerment is lasting.

How It Works:  Engaging Global Community & Learning

Each year, GIN conferences bring together whole-host-school-communities, visiting GIN students, community leaders and GIN educators with change-makers, experts of all ages, NGOs, and representatives from educational organizations.

GIN Creating Connections:

We empower our global network to engage as collaborators, creators and co-developers of our GIN Curriculum and GIN best practices necessary to build, organize and implement sustainable GIN culture and lifelong learning through the practice of equitable empathetic action.

GIN Social Media and Journalism:

We connect and promote collaboration between GIN students, teachers, and schools through the effective use of social media platforms, and to give the GIN community access to resources, examples, and testimonials about GIN, GIN project-based solutions, and the 20 Global Issues. We address local-global issues and foster local-global dialogue and solutions.

GIN Global Mentors:

We are an interconnected and self-empowered global community of expert and young changemakers working together to collaboratively examine local-global issue systems to build empathetic local-global solutions while strengthening our identity as active global citizens.

GIN Global Ambassadors (GAP):

GAP empowers young global citizens as community builders; dedicated to creating and developing a supportive global learning community.  We are a network of global changemakers engaged in local action. With each GIN Ambassador leading the charge, we act in partnership with our local school communities who we believe have a responsibility to act as epicenters for empathetic change and socio-environmental justice. The GAP learning community will study and deliver documentation of their experience, understandings, tools and models of effective local-global empathetic change that will strengthen and nurture community culture, learning, global dialogue, and action.