The sixth Annual Global Engagement Summit kicked off Wednesday night with an opening banquet, speech and Bhangra dance performance at the Woman’s Club of Evanston.
Sixty-nine delegates are attending GES, a conference run by more than 100 NU students that facilitates discussion and collaboration among young global leaders, said GES co-director SESP senior Jennifer Hemesath. Delegates go to panels, workshops and speeches April 21 to April 24.
“We’re bringing in people who are really interested in community development, social impact, social justice and international issues,” said SESP sophomore Joan DeGennaro, a chair of GES’s logistics committee. “It works to establish a community of like-minded young people who all want to continue to make these types of changes in the world.”
This year, GES aimed to increase its presence at NU, opening workshops to all students and including 12 NU delegates, Hemesath said. She also said she wanted to increase the caliber of the conference by providing shorter, more topical talks and being more selective in the online application process.
“You have this passion, this interest and you want to make a tangible change,” she said of the delegates.
But these delegates don’t just aspire to change the world – they’re developing actual projects, she said.
“Most often, people who apply to GES as a delegate have some sort of project idea,” Hemesath said. “The project is related to social change in some way. It might be in their own community. It might be in a community abroad. It might be microfinance, it could be related to women’s health, to education – there’s a wide variety of project types and topics.”
Eugenia Lee, a senior at Tufts University, has been working for over a year to develop a water and sanitation project for primary schools in Kenya. In June, Lee said she will move to Nairobi to work with the NGO.
“It’s a combination of a hand-washing marketing campaign and this low cost sink model that we’re hoping to implement in primary schools to improve hygiene and health of the children there,” Lee said.
This is Lee’s first GES experience, though she has participated in similar conferences across the country. She said she attends to receive feedback on her project.
“I think the best way to really learn and move forward with your project is talking to other people who are doing similar things and sort of exchanging ideas,” she said.
Like the reach of its projects, GES is an international event. Niang Nangchukja, a recent graduate of Qinghai University in China, is both a first-time delegate and one of around 15 international delegates. He said the high literacy and low income rates in his native Shanghai province, a rural and “hurting area,” inspired him to develop a project.
Nangchukja’s social enterprise seeks to modernize traditional textiles and handicrafts to generate local income while preserving culture.
“This project is something that changes people’s lives,” Nangchukja said. “I came here to meet people who share the same interests. I’m really excited about the speakers and the intellectual journey that I’m going to go through with the students at the university and also with the American delegates.”
The first speaker of the conference, Dr. Shom Dasgupta, is an anthropologist and physician. An NU graduate, Dasgupta said he has been working in Guatemala since his last year in medical schools to provide access to medical care and health education and fight “unnecessary suffering and mortality among the indigenous poor.”
During his speech, Dasgupta emphasized the need for healthcare that is not only medically sound but also “morally relevant to communities.”
He encouraged providing aid to impoverished areas but said leaders must work with villages rather than trying to replace their customs with foreign practices. Sarah Marks, a delegate from Atlanta, said Dasgupta’s message resonated with her experiences conducting research in the Gambia, where the official language is English but few outside of the capital actually communicate this way.
“The indigenous language stuff is absolutely critical,” Marks said. “What do you do when there are 12 different indigenous languages within a small community? That was really interesting to hear about the importance of language.”
At GES, Marks said she is looking forward to small group workshops about technical implementation of projects. She said she also hopes to make contacts with other delegates who can give her advice to implement her proposal, an initiative to use technology to improve maternal health care for illiterate women who lack immediate access to doctors.
“We’re interested in developing really simple mobile phones,” Marks said. “You can put on graphical overlays indicating, ‘I’m bleeding. I’m about to give birth,’ that can be sent to various health officials that can then monitor what’s going on and decide who they can deploy.”
While the purpose of GES is to promote these kinds of innovative ideas, Hemesath said the conference is also about creating a community among delegates and staff members.
“Dr. Shom Dasgupta was a fascinating speaker,” she said. “He gave a really intellectual and analytical talk about engaging in these issues and work on the ground. Also, the dancing is always really fun – the Bhangra team was fantastic. It’s always nice to start off the summit with high energy and I think we accomplished that with this event.”
