Our GIN Project Best Practices
Our work is never done!
The GIN Student Admin are a team of community builders who value leading with integrity, collaborative lifelong learning, and empowered global citizenry. The students who join the program are committed to personal growth and discovery as leaders of today. GIN Student Admin Members are dedicated to creating and developing a supportive global learning community and network of active changemakers. GIN Student Admin Members champion empathetic and equitable sustainability to create real and lasting impact.
We see ourselves as the leaders of today who understand that community-centered change is a continuous learning process that we must begin to build and hone now.
We see our school communities as having great potential to act as epicenters and testing grounds for student-led and designed, empathetic change and viable solutions.
We see our local community as participants, co-developers and team members of our initiatives.
We are committed to building local, empathetic action with a global mindset in partnership with school communities and our international networks.
GIN Student Admin Team: What We Do
We empower ourselves and our communities through youth-led-and-designed, community-centered initiatives rooted in a culture of empathy, equity, and sustainability. The GIN Student Admin Team is a learning community studies and delivers honed understandings, tools, and models of effective local-global empathetic change that strengthen community culture, learning, global dialogue, and action. As a collaborative learning community and team, we create, test, apply, provide experienced-based feedback, reiterate, and develop. We ask for continuous feedback from our stakeholders: GIN Student Admin Members, G.I.N. educators and community members. We are responsible for building the Global Issues Network voice and common ground understandings for our global community. We are committed to supporting our student-led GIN Communities around the world in enacting GIN Project Best Practices that are rooted in and empower equitable and sustainable processes and impact.
A GIN Project employs the talents, skills, knowledge base and resources of community stakeholders. This includes but is not limited to: community members, groups, leaders, organizations, and businesses. GIN Project participants learn from and are empowered by each other in a learning community. Together, they build a shared network that engages community members as direct and indirect team members to actively work to address the issue and actualize their shared goals. GIN Students actively seek feedback, insight, and engagement from their peers, mentors, experts, community members, and project’s stakeholders to heighten the efficacy of their GIN Project in line with GIN Project Best Practices.
A GIN Project is initiated by students who identify as engaged global citizens who are driven to utilize their passion to address a self-identified local-global challenge within their local community. GIN Projects empower local-global GIN communities to actively engage as a network of solution-oriented local-global citizens who continue to: learn, equip, educate, inspire, mobilize to create real impact for a more sustainable and equitable world.
GIN Students lead, build and empower an inclusive transgenerational community team. A GIN Project employs a community-centered approach where real relationships are built through collaborative problem-solving that is inclusive of all stakeholders, ongoing dialogue, interviews, surveys, and observation. Embedded in the project process, GIN Students facilitate collaborative community feedback loops to ensure transparency, accountability and efficacy between the GIN Student Team and stakeholders. GIN Students include community-generated qualitative measurements to evaluate the GIN Project’s impact and progress.
Our global issues are our shared challenge and therefore our shared responsibility to collaboratively address. It is with this understanding of our issues as shared local-global issue systems that we empower our local-global communities and engage our identities as local-global citizens. We see ourselves as innovative collaborators who explore our ability and responsibility to solve our global issues wherever we are in the world. As local-global citizens we design equitable and systemic solutions that value and sustain life. We seek out and share viable solutions that stop, reverse and innovate how we live and think about ourselves in the world in order to address our shared global issues. GIN Students can show evidence of the GIN Empathetic Systems Approach to Design Thinking; a process that asks students to investigate, interview and include stakeholders as they map the issue system and solution. GIN Students understand our global issues as shared systems. GIN Teams are able to show a deep understanding of past to present relationships, causal patterns within issue systems, as well as the annual collection and analysis of experiential histories and academic research. GIN Students conduct serious analysis of their issue systems and barriers to successful impact. GIN Students excavate design constraints such as access to resources, scope and scale of project to create design parameters. With this in mind, GIN Students identify leverage points with respect to their context and findings and take purposeful action with their community partners.
We commit to the study, measurement, and analysis of our local-global issue systems and their solutions. GIN Students develop, organize and communicate project goals through Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that show evidence of positive impact. GIN Students continuously and consistently collect and measure quantitative and qualitative data. GIN Members are accountable for tracking their progress and evaluating their impact. We ask each student to analyze and comprehensively share their impact with an impact statement. This impact statement is meant to be updated each year to show and share progress.
GIN Members show and share their GIN Project’s learning process with their local-global community through community forums and the GINteractive Learning Platform. GIN Teams are transparent and encourage feedback as engaged learners, community organizers, and local-global citizens. GIN Students actively engage with each other as a global citizenry, a collaborative collective of global citizens, by regularly sharing their progress on their GIN Project page and, in doing so, leverage the message on their profile to amplify their voice. GIN Mentors challenge the GIN Team to deliver a transparent, valid, and accurate account of the GIN Students’ learning process: strategies, methodologies, and models of change.
GIN Student Teams understand that one of the indices of sustainability is the ability to maintain and progress over time. To build a project with staying power, one must understand that equity and sustainability are inextricably interdependent when creating lasting change.
It is understood that to create sustainability we must engage equitable planning, processes and inclusion of community members. GIN Students are dedicated empathetic community organizers, changemakers, mentors, and lifelong learners who develop their skills as a lifelong practice. GIN Project Teams design action plans that foster student-led sustainable, transgenerational, community-centered team engagement with community partners. A GIN Project includes community team members in all phases of its development, implementation and evaluation process. A GIN Project empowers the local community to engage while promoting and demonstrating equitable practices. GIN Members collaboratively develop common ground understandings with their community regarding both the issue and GIN Project solution. Common ground understandings include key ideas and accessible action that are culturally relevant and viable.
Access to natural resources is only ensured if we steward healthy ecosystems and prioritize equitable and sustainable value systems. Our planet and its ecosystems are balanced in such a way that we must see our environment as yet another stakeholder. With this in mind, GIN Project Teams develop action plans that prioritize and practice equitable sustainability in their processes and vision for long term impact. Whether a GIN Project is socially focused or environmentally focused we ask each team to examine their project through both lenses to seek out and align with sustainable and equitable best practices and understandings. GIN Students engage in sustainable accountability and practices. GIN Teams access their use of materials, energy sources, transportation, food, teaching supplies, event supplies, etc. to accrue low-to-no carbon emissions. GIN Teams actively seek out methodologies and alternatives that involve carbon sequestration, environmentally-sound and renewable materials and practices.
GIN Students design, develop and implement an action plan with transparency that ensures equitable sustainability in alignment with the mission of the GIN Project and GIN Project Best Practices. GIN Students show and share how they have developed sustainable systems and structures that support the project and team in reaching their goals with their Community Stakeholders. GIN Students detail and share systems, structures, and protocols in GIN Project Team’s materials to show learning and progress over time, ensuring improvement and continuity. In alignment with learning best practices, GIN Student Teams share and develop strategies, methodologies, and skills with their multi-generational community team as engaged community organizers and share their learning with the world as responsible local-global citizens working to address our shared global issues. GIN Project Team materials will be created to increase transparency, broad access, common ground understanding of solutions, and used to scale and transfer projects for the purpose of creating chapters and networks of students teams around the world addressing the same issue. In connection with the original project as a collaborative learning community, students will connect through our interactive GIN platform to test, peer-review, and collaborate to innovate and create viable solutions with greater efficacy. Ideally and additionally, students work to make their project financially sound with sustainable revenue streams as needed to ensure long-term action and impact.
We live and engage on a local and global scale every day. We recognize that our local and global issues and their solutions are interconnected and interdependent systems; that our shared global issues directly impact our local realities. Each and every one of us is a local-global citizen who is responsible and interconnected to both each other and the world around us. As local-global citizens, we understand that we belong to, are part of, and have a responsibility to engage, learn and collaborate with both our local and global community at the same time. As local-global citizens, we understand ourselves as part of an interconnected local-global ecosystem; working to address local-global issues with local-global solutions. As local-global citizens we understand that our collective local actions have both local and global impact. The first step to becoming a member of the Global Issues Network (GIN) is identifying as an engaged and responsible local-global citizen. As GIN Members and local-global citizens we understand that we have agency as community organizers and are changemakers with real impact; that we are leaders of today who champion equity and sustainability within our local-global communities.
GIN Students actively develop their understanding of themselves: individual strengths, passion(s), interests, learning strategies, healthy boundaries, and personal identities. GIN Students find their authentic voices and identity for themselves, as themselves. As engaged local-global citizens, students understand that they are multidimensional and can hold more than one identity at the same time. GIN Members take the time to understand their shared context and to reflect on their learning process, checking bias and their perception of self, the world around them and the people who make up their local-global community. GIN Members value and practice self-reflection and empowerment as lifelong learners who reflect on their strengths, set learning goals for themselves, and evaluate their own progress and success.
A GIN Project is created, designed, tested, developed and improved continuously each school year by GIN Students who are actively working to build a more sustainable and equitable world. GIN Students focus on learning as a means of meeting their GIN Project’s needs and overcoming design challenges. GIN Students build collaborative student-led teams, partnerships and networks in support of their GIN Project’s mission and the GINetwork’s vision to advance the efficacy of their GIN Project and our collective impact as a global community.
A GIN Project is supported and mentored by an educator who instills trust and respect while empowering and challenging students to take the lead in all aspects of a GIN Project. GIN Mentors understand that a GIN Project’s progress rests in the students’ hands and supports their students in gaining life experience, lasting understandings, and life skills that will prepare them to take charge as leaders of today. GIN Mentors are committed to engaging and sharing learning best practices in all aspects of their Mentorship, including ensuring GIN Students’ safety and wellbeing, with GIN Students. GIN Educator Mentors understand their responsibility to coach and impart skills that they have mastered as community organizers, expert facilitators, lifelong learners, educators and collaborators.