Choosing Issues & Can I do this?

Global PACT trainings do not pre-select projects, prime the pump or otherwise interfere in the process. A training is yours to define, according to your interests, your knowledge and your skills. Together, you and your team members will select and develop a project of your own that benefits the local community.

This, of course, raises the obvious question: "What do I have to contribute?” Yes, a lot. Here’s how and why.

In the same way that the issue each Global PACT team pursues represents a fusion of team members' interests, the team’s capacity to carry out the project reflects the fusion of the team members' diverse knowledge and skills. You are complete strangers to, for instance, the Hill Tribe villagers of northern Thailand. Whatever expertise you may have, your knowledge and skills are worthless without your Thai partners. They speak Thai – and Akha or Hmong or Lisau or Lisu. They understand how to get things done in the villages. They know the headmen, the enthusiasts and the nay-sayers. They know where to go for the statistics you will need; they can conduct the interviews and the surveys. Without them, you are clueless as to what's going on in their communities.

This isn’t a one way street. Whatever local expertise your Thai partners may have is worthless without your knowledge and skills. You have a wealth of fundamental problem solving skills. Without these skills, the problems you will tackle in the villages would simply go on festering as they have for years.

What Global PACT does is to produce fusion in the same sense as in nuclear physics. We slam you together, and from the resulting collision a brand new element is created and a huge amount of energy is released.

In a successful group, it is not just what they bring and what you bring to the party. It is not even that together you collectively have more skills than you have individually. The magic of fusion is that in a successful group something wholly new is produced. You will leave transformed by what you have seen and done. Your experience and research in the villages will inform how you see and analyze the world. Likewise, the legacy of civic knowledge and skills you leave behind will shape how your partners think about every problem to confront their communities. And that is not only entirely new, it is hugely powerful.