MUN Impact

To date, MUN Impact has survived solely off of small-dollar donations and crowdfunding attempts. MUN Impact has no paid staff. Though all MUN Impact activities are student-planned and executed, adult supervision is required to ensure the safety of its members and the quality of its deliverables. For the last 1.5 years, two adults have been working 60+ hour weeks for the organization without any remuneration. If the organization fails to obtain a funding source in the near future, these adults will be forced to seek other employment; consequently, the organization will have to severely restrict its activities and shelve plans for further growth.

Everything at MUN Impact is designed to be a learning experience. Securing funding will allow it to hire consultants to guide students as they develop their projects (marketing, graphic design, event management, web development, etc).

Funding will also be used to pay for enhanced tech services, website enhancements, in-person events/summits, and increased insurance and legal coverage.

While the funding component of the Elevate Prize is enticing, MUN Impact will benefit immeasurably from the coaching and guidance provided by the MIT Solve team and its collaborators. 

For over thirty years I have worked as an educator in the US, Jordan, Malaysia, Qatar, and beyond. Early on, I realize that the concept of Model United Nations as a simple roleplaying simulation was outdated and would yield untapped potential. While I was Head of THIMUN Qatar, I innovated within the MUN space to create the Qatar Leadership Conference which gave global youth a platform to showcase their action toward achieving the SDGs. The response to these events was tremendous and initiated successive waves of student action. Seeing the explosive potential of such activities, I began MUN Impact in 2017.

MUN Impact is an organically youth-driven organization that was first formed to bring awareness and direct action to support the SDGs to the MUN community. Spurred on by the pandemic, a deeper dynamic has emerged, that of a uniquely global youth leadership incubator. As students develop the real-world skills to plan, collaborate and execute programs and initiatives online, they are also helping to formulate their own agenda. MUN Impact is working to develop the widest, most diverse network of youth who are supported to take direct action in their communities.

For over 70 years, a growing global movement of middle school, high school and university students have participated in Model United Nations (MUN), an activity that brings students together to role-play as international diplomats to discuss and solve global issues. MUN encourages empathy and awareness of challenging cross-border issues and fosters collaborative problem solving to develop solutions. While this incredibly popular academic activity has grown to include millions of participants, it has also become insular and fails to mobilize students towards tangible action on the issues they have learned about. There was a growing need for an organization that will catalyze the evolution of the current MUN ecosystem and harness students’ energy beyond the conference walls to inspire global change at the community level. MUN Impact was created to transform the global MUN experience of over half a million global youth by (1) making discussions/debates more relevant in their inclusion of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), (2) channeling the conference energy and directing it into local community action to support globally conscious programs and mandates, and (3) mobilizing the awareness, engagement, and support of the untapped global network of MUN alumni that number in the tens of millions.

Model UN has largely been a program that exists at the major conferences that take place around the world. Within the walls of the conference, students are playing the role of countries and engaging closely with the material. However, once the conference is over, the students largely return to their lives, or may just start planning for the next debate and the next conference. MUN Impact is an innovation on the existing MUN network because MUN Impact is focused on educating and motivating students to take action on the issues they are already studying and debating. Only a small number of conferences discuss student impact and action, and few have the capacity to follow students on a long-term basis. MUN Impact is unique because we seek to cultivate a sense of personal responsibility for achieving the SDGs within each student and harnessing the vast energy of a global youth movement to make change on a large scale. While conferences are largely concerned with students over a span of 1-4 days, we are concerned with students as they create a future for themselves.

MUN Impact has taken the words of Amina J Mohammed, the Deputy Secretary-General of the United Nations to heart: It is time to invest in education's power to transform. It is a time for partnership and solidarity, for shaping and innovation, and to provide youth with platform to take measurable action to achieve the SDGs en masse. The tens of thousands of students at MUN Impact are committed to this partnership and to shaping a future that is more inclusive, innovative, and connected.

To achieve these ends we are continuing to grow our various SDG-focused courses, curricula, and engagement platforms (MUN@Home, Online Model UN, Global Summits, etc). To further increase youth action toward achieving the SDGs we are tracking and “gamifying” their activities via our 100K Deeds Challenge. Students will have their actions tracked and will be rewarded for their efforts. Though we have enjoyed the significant and ongoing collaboration with UN organizations such as UNODC, UNHCR, UNDCG, and others, the word is spreading about our unique organization and its ability to galvanize youth to action. We welcome further collaboration with UN entities and are engaging with UNICEF, the UN Youth Envoy, and UN DSG - Amina Mohammed.