Change Lives of High Potential Amazing Urban youth from Boston + New York!

Only rarely do minority youth whom are historically underrepresented have the chance to step out of their daily reality and confront privilege, power and impoverishment in a global context. Global Potential (GP) gives these youth this opportunity to transform themselves into catalysts of change. The cycle of poverty is broken through combining the untapped resources of marginalized youth with sustainable international development. GP fills a gap to empower hundreds of urban youth from low-income diverse communities around the U.S. with the skills and travel experiences to create positive change in their lives, their neighborhoods, and the global community.

GP’s model is to partner with front-line educators and urban schools in order to: create immersive and transformative experiences for participating youth; increase youth confidence and leadership skills; improve educational outcomes for low income youth; create concrete benefits for, and lifelong relationships with, the international communities where the young people work; and, to help youth identify and meet local community needs through their creation of social entrepreneurship projects. For many GP participants, field placements represent an intimate return to countries where their families have come from, or important explorations, across boundaries and assumption, into another culture.

Since the inception of our international pilot program in 2008, GP has led four additional successful trips to the Dominican Republic (DR) . We continue to see incredible transformations among our youth and in the local and global communities where our youth live and work. GP has been awarded three contracts from youth-serving agencies around New York, allowing us to extend our program to GED students in Washington Heights, to truant youth in East New York, and to Transfer School students in Queens and Harlem.

Studies have long shown that service-learning and international exchange programs uniquely allow young people to grow as mature, self-confident leaders; to cultivate creative problem solving skills ; to work and maintain cross-cultural relationships; and, to understand a sense of belonging in, and responsibility to, local and global communities. Such experiences also tend to ignite young people’s sense of purpose in academic engagement and confidence in setting and achieving positive long-term goals and outcomes.

But few programs currently exist for low-income youth to participate in a combination of meaningful cross-cultural exchanges, leadership development, and explorations of the world outside of the city. In response, GP is providing key services to lowest-income youth with quality educational opportunities to volunteer abroad – in solidarity with the members of communities they serve; to engage projects that confront inequity and poverty, head-on; and, to gain the skills, sensitivities, and perspective that will enable them to become leaders of positive change in their own lives, and in local and global communities.

GP has directly run its full program since its inception at its primary partner sites in Brooklyn: the Bushwick Academy of Urban Planning and the International High School @ Prospect Heights. In 2010, we have initiated a pilot project with 12 youth, in Boston, MA, at the Edward M. Kennedy Academy for Health Careers, while having recruited an additional 24 youth in New York.

Since October 2007, we have worked with 75 youth, in Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Washington Heights, and have taken 44 of them to live for with families in isolated, rural villages called ‘Bateys’ in the southwest DR, near the Haitian border, usually for 1.5 months. While abroad, our students engage in internships with local leaders, and as teams have successfully: • Created murals, 2 municipal censuses, and community clean-up and HIV testing campaigns • Constructed a classroom that fits over 120 students, 500 ft of sidewalk, and 2 community gardens • Created 5 short documentaries about the Bateys (one of which was just accepted into the UN’s Plural Plus Youth Video Festival, to be screened in 15 locations globally), took family portraits, and wrote family biographies