What Skills Will I Learn?
Just like Mongolia you will partner with students from our host community and across the world designed to help you learn about your own ability to work across cultures to develop and implement projects to benefit their community, your community and communities across the world.
Cross-Cultural Skills
Very few worthwhile things can be accomplished by one person working alone. As an activist, you will encounter many different people and viewpoints. Everyone’s perspective is valuable, and people’s values and beliefs are usually a result of their unique background and experiences. Where one person sees a dead end, another sees a clever solution; this is one great thing about working with people who think a little differently than you. During your Global PACT training, you will discuss cross-cultural issues and develop your ability to learn from and work effectively with a diverse set of peers.
About Our Location & Make Friends
Each of our training locations is an opportunity to learn about the unique issues your partners confront, what you can do to work with them, and what ultimately what you can change in that community.
You'll also learn the process of organizing by doing it and an approach to critical problem solving that will help you regardless of what you do afterwards. But in addition, you'll have made incredible friendships, experienced things you'd never imagine and walk away with a different sense of what your role in issues could be. Broadly you will learn:
Understand How to Approach Issues
Global PACT teaches the knowledge, skills and attitudes you need to be an agent for community development. Through a series of integrated team-based workshop-style exercises you will will learn how to identify a critical local problem, break it down to its root causes, and identify where you can take action. In order to make real change you and your team will go out into the field to test the merits of your ideas with local stakeholders by doing real-world or action research
in the community.
In this process, you will learn to test your ideas with the reality of issues critical to the local communities you aim to help, you will develop an implementable project idea, and you will design effective implementation plans. This process will teach you effective problem solving skills and teach you not only how to create change, but actually make change happen in the process.
How to Build Your Team
To implement a project requires an organization, so during the entire program you will be building the team which will be the engine of your ideas for change. There is no other way to learn how to build an effective team other than doing it. In an integrated series of exercises, you will have to communicate, make decisions, and achieve a goal together with other people. This is easily the most difficult part of Global PACT: communicating your ideas and expectations to the group and learning how to live, work and accomplish your goals together. Your team will be comprised of a roughly equal number of students from organizations and schools across our host community.
How to Spread Your Message
You must learn to communicate clearly and effectively if you want anyone in the general public to pay attention to your ideas. Therefore, during your Global PACT training, you will practice communicating your organization's message and mission. Daily, you will speak to the public and other target audiences, and you will learn to work with print, Internet and television media organizations. At the end of your training, your group will launch your organization’s first project at a live press conference with local media coverage. This will broaden the effect of your organization and bring you closer to the ultimate goal of creating change.
How to Create and Learn from Real Change
This process will help you learn how to start and organize any project in any kind of organization. Skills you will learn include breaking down complex issues, making presentations, public speaking, leadership, effective research, networking, group decision-making, finance and fundraising, cross-cultural communication, working with the media, and conflict resolution. These skills are fully transferable in the creation and operation of any successful organization, project, business, or association. Prior participants have started their own small businesses, launched local change initiatives, and become directors of nonprofits. Regardless of your path, we will challenge, transform and inspire you to become a positive agent of change in your community.
