What does it mean to be a global citizen? And how can a network of global citizens promote international development?
To find out, we talked to the Melton Foundation, the only global fellowship program that unites a network of more than 450 fellows to act as global citizens, addressing local and global challenges throughout their lives.
For the Melton Foundation, global citizenship is a way for individuals and organizations to work together across boundaries of place and identity to address global challenges.
Working with six partner universities in Chile, China, Germany, Ghana, India and the United States, as well as local partner organizations and other NGOs, Fellows create their own projects, support other fellows’ projects, and collaborate with partners on issues ranging from promoting equality and sustainability to improving education and reducing conflict. Fellow projects can be local, such as the collaboration with a rural indigenous school in Chile with the goal of adding global citizenship education to its curriculum, or global, such as a climate change awareness campaign spanning many countries.
“We know that the global challenges we face — climate, pandemics, getting people out of poverty — are inherently extremely complex, global in nature, interconnected,” says executive director Winthrop Carty. “But the traditional, still prevalent silos – whether institutional, jurisdictional, disciplinary, geographic – cannot address these problems. We must develop the capability to collaborate across all these boundaries in order to address these challenges. We need a new paradigm in which problems are approached globally with solutions that work both for local and regional populations as well as people and places impacted across the world.”
So, how exactly can you become a global citizen? “You can’t just be aware of our global challenges”, says Carty. “It’s not enough to be concerned about problems like climate change or global inequality. No. You need to join others both locally and globally to help solve them.”
By magnifying this effect across hundreds of Fellows’ lifetimes through its network, the Melton Foundation aims to transform how global problems are solved as global citizenship is adopted by individuals, communities, businesses, and governments. “By turning fellows into role models, we are building a future of the world’s problem-solvers,” Carty explained.
Networks of Networks
The Melton Foundation sets an example for global problem solving and partners with other networks to develop scalable solutions. Recently, the Melton Foundation joined MIT’s D-Lab Practical Impact Alliance, which is a collaboration among businesses, nonprofits, and higher education institutions to create innovative solutions to global poverty. They also co-convened a series of roundtables on “Leveraging Networks for Impact” in New York City together with the Institute for International Education (IIE) and the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs. The Melton Foundation also sends teams of Fellows to the events of other networks to exchange ideas and ignite new collaborations. Just this year, teams of Fellows have ventured to Brussels, Hong Kong, Johannesburg, Rio, Tunis, Iowa, and Washington, DC for the conventions of Ashoka U, Climate Reality, United Social Entrepreneurship, and the EU DEEEP Initiative.
This global network model is not without its challenges, especially if organizations don’t reinvent themselves in fundamental ways. “You don’t have the same hierarchy of control in a network,” Carty explained. “You’re empowering others, which means you have to let go; you’re more of an enabler than an implementer. At the same time, you really do depend on the leadership of members in the network for exciting and valuable things to happen.”
The secret for making it work is to have the right mix of cohesiveness and flexibility. “There are two things you have to be able to do simultaneously and they are equally important,” Carty says. “One thing is mission — you have to be very clear about what the mission of the network is and whether the members who are joining it are aligned with the mission. At the same time, you must be flexible or open minded. You can’t have groupthink, where all the members think there is only one approach to solving that challenge.”
The global citizenship network model offers an alternative approach to international development, one that emphasizes empathy and personal responsibility in a collaborative framework, and that nurtures personal and human development as the basis for promoting solutions to global problems.