Global Nomads Group

I will use the Elevate Prize funding to center marginalized youth in the creation and implementation of powerful cross-cultural curricular content for use by youth worldwide. 

Building on Global Nomads Group’s (GNG) successful Content Creation Lab 2020 pilot--in which youth connected across distance and difference to develop meaningful social justice curricular programming for their global peers--I will: 

1. Engage marginalized youth from multiple countries in a rigorous collaborative process to create thematic written and video content. This content will place those traditionally on the margins at the center of all design considerations (content and delivery).
2. Lead cascading leadership development opportunities for GNG staff, college-age team leaders and high-school-age youth interns, grounded in the work of leading content creation.
3. Optimize/Enhance accessibility features in existing and new GNG curricula to eliminate barriers to inclusion by (a) engaging adult disabled consultants; (b) including text- and video-based versions, including sign language interpretation, captioning, and image descriptions in multiple languages); and (c) expanding partnerships with local disability justice groups in various countries on marketing and recruitment to increase reach into schools and organizations serving disabled youth worldwide; provide funding to initiate and sustain partnerships and support meaningful youth participation.

Ten years ago my career (university professor, published author, CEO of the NYC Leadership Academy) paused when my son suddenly fell severely ill. After six years focused on his care needs, I joined Global Nomads Group as Chief of Programs and Learning. Equipped with the perspective of raising a multiply disabled, medically complex child, I felt an urgency to radically rethink educational approaches to equity and inclusion, empathy and compassion, and a sense of belonging.

At Global Nomads Group, I lead teams responsible for designing educational programs--for youth by youth--that explore the social issues that young people believe matter most. My approach is to create the conditions for marginalized youth to take ownership and responsibility for designing engaging learning opportunities for their peers, while supporting them with the tools and processes necessary to produce high quality work. In short, I set things up and get out of the way.

Having learned from my son’s exclusion due to barrier-fraught architecture and attitudes, my vision demands access for and centering of marginalized youth as the key designers of meaningful and robust learning opportunities for their global peers. I plan to grow these efforts with the Elevate Prize.

For more than 20 years, Global Nomads Group’s virtual exchange programs for middle and high school students have leveraged the power of storytelling to increase young people’s empathy, global awareness, 21st Century Skills, and action orientation. From lugging satellites into rural Rwanda to connect youth via emerging videoconferencing technologies to using the now ubiquitous mobile phones, GNG has been connecting youth across distance and difference for decades.

More recently, GNG has turned our focus to engaging youth in the design of our programming, centering their voices, and attending to those who have been overlooked or excluded from such connections. Currently, youth are our content creators, collaborating with their global peers from their classrooms, community centers or homes. The results of their work allows other youth to share stories about their families and communities, question each other’s preconceptions, break down stereotypes, and discuss the social issues that matter to them most.

Global Nomads Group will continue to innovate by creating new content and platforms that (a) work in settings with limited resources, (b) ensure accessibility and inclusion, (c) align to the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, and (d) deepen youth capacity for seeing the inherent worth in all human beings.

Global Nomads Group’s main innovation is the centering of youth in the design of our curricula that are thematically aligned to the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. We trust youth to work collaboratively across distance and difference, and provide them with the tools they need to collaborate on rigorously designed work products. 

We have found that our youth-designed curricula demonstrate more courage and edge than what our adult designers had prior envisioned. With absolutely no restrictions or influence from adults, youth teams chose to focus on Human Rights, Women’s Rights, Mental Health, and Sports, with attention to issues of intersectionality, gender-based violence, ableism, stigma and racism in ways that resonate with youth (e.g., focusing on beauty standards, social media influences, and their own access to educational opportunities as entry points to the issues of women’s rights, mental health and human rights respectively).
 
Our staff provide the training in backwards curriculum mapping (Wiggins) and skill-development for research and writing, video production and social media marketing. Our formative evaluations show that the resulting new curricula have garnered more positive feedback from (non-designer) youth engaging with these curricula (including higher Net Promotor Scores) than our adult-generated themes.

Global Nomads Group gives youth experiences that reveal our universal shared humanity and equal worth. By collaborating in our Content Creation Lab or reading and sharing stories within the resulting curricula, youth gain insight and exposure to lives quite different from their own. We take care to ensure that youth don’t just look for similarities, but also respect and appreciate differences. The results are profound.

• 100% of educators said the program helped their students see something from someone else's perspective.
• 99% of students said they learned to respect the cultural, ethnic and/or religious differences of their global peers.
• 98% of students said they will use what they learned during the program to contribute positively to their local and/or global communities 

Our next steps are to increase access to our youth-driven content creation model with explicit focus on marginalized youth. Such expansion requires significant resources in order to overcome barriers to access through technology, connectivity, outreach, and design. The Elevate Prize will enable us to take these steps to achieve far greater impact with youth whose voices and experiences are seldom at the center of learning design.