"Global citizenship begins at home" is the mantra of Macalester College's recently launched Institute for Global Citizenship. The Institute aims "to forge the college's work on internationalism, multicultu-ralism, and service into a more compelling, integrated, and intellectually powerful whole" by combining Macalester's International Center with the Community Service Office. The Institute has sponsored a high-profile speaker series that includes U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan and New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. Aside from attempts to bring visibility to the concept of global citizenship, which also includes advertising on Minnesota Public Radio, the Institute is focusing on its urban location through place-based community-based learning. Macalester students learn about globalization through the lens of two Twin Cities neighborhoods with large immigrant populations: Lake Street in Minneapolis and the West Side of St. Paul.
Macalester College's International Roundtable keynote address by Janice Gross Stein, "Late for a Very Important Date: The United Nations in Wonderland"
Macalester College Professor Ahmed Samatar and Karin Trail-Johnson talk about Macalester's new institute and how being a global citizen starts at home.
Sometimes, hope is found in the most unlikely places. Emily Harris, who studied abroad in Cape Town, South Africa, found hope and inspiration volunteering at Golden Girls, a home for mentally and physically disabled orphans. The Princeton University senior was initially overwhelmed by the desperation—the children at Golden Girls each owned only one set of clothes, ran around barefoot, and some were covered in scabs. Many had mangled arms and legs—conditions that could have easily been solved in the U.S. by wearing corrective braces. The home housed 65 children in only two rooms. Glass and trash were strewn across the hard dirt; barbed wire surrounded the Langa township compound, located in a slum neighborhood. “[Golden Girls] was such a hopeful place in what should be a very upsetting and depressing area,” explains Harris.
Each afternoon, Harris and the other volunteers would massage the children’s legs and arms for physical therapy. The volunteers would then play with the children—face-painting, carrying individual kids outside to the makeshift swing set, and teaching them to count and sing.
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When Panama’s National Cattlemen’s Association needed to substantiate the ineffectiveness of an agricultural policy that was hurting their beef sales and putting farmers out of business, they turned to Brandon Nicolay’s independent study project (ISP), which he completed as a student in the SIT Study Abroad program "Panama: Development and Conservation program."
Nicolay’s study, presented to Panama’s president Martin Torrijos and his cabinet ministers, became the key evidence that convinced the government to reevaluate agricultural policy in the Bocas del Toro province, says Aly Dagang, academic director for SIT’s program in Panama.
My ISP was on the ineffectiveness of a provincial quarantine of beef due to an outbreak of bovine tuberculosis,” says Nicolay. “I found that in the seven years of the quarantine only eight percent of cattle had been tested,” he says.
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