The World is More Than I Know

At the beginning of the year, on the card where I was supposed to write what I hoped to gain from the Global Citizenship Seminar, I wrote, "Networking, networking, networking! I want to have the courage to reach out to professionals, and to be able to hold my own when I speak with them one-on-one." When I consider how much networking I've done so far this year, and how much better I've gotten at it, I think that this "hope to gain" was a success! I practiced this skill in meetings with Ms. Edwards, my mentor for my grant proposal, and in meetings with Sarah, the director of Families Forward. I practiced this skill before I even knew what my grant proposal was going to be centered around, in reaching out to different organizations during the preliminary stages of the project. I gained a lot more this year than just networking skills, though. I learned how to stay consistently passionate about something, and to make sure may work reflects that. I learned how t...

On May 9th, seniors from Flintridge Prep's Border Politics class hosted a panel discussion, answering a range of questions-- like "How does the development of a physical barrier affect the relationship between nation-states?" and, “Should people be able to more freely across borders?”-- using research related to their respective concentrations. Firstly, the Prep students began their panel by defining a border, be it geopolitical, virtual, or physical. Throughout their discussion, the students made sure to cover multiple perspectives on issues, explaining border conflicts in sometimes pragmatic logic, sometimes humanitarian logic. The panelists incorporated pertinent historical examples of various border conflicts in their answers to broader questions, referencing disputes between India and China, Israel and Palestine, and the Europe Migrant Crisis. Issues of asymmetrical power were discussed (see: China's One Belt, One Road initiative), as was economic disparity. On...

As part of their final, GS capstone project, my classmates Ian Macleod and Victor Swezey hosted and moderated a panel discussion about The Housing Crisis in Garland. The five panelists were experts from a host of different fields: Alice Kimm, affordable housing architect and Poly mom; William Huang, director of the Pasadena Housing Department; Jose Felix Cabrera Larios, a Mexican-American immigrant and affordable-housing activist who was forced to live in a single with 14 other people upon his arrival to the U.S.; and Clemente Franco, Board Chair of Inquilinos Unidos (Tenants United) and tenant lawyer representing those who've been illegally evicted. The discussion, which was hosted in both English and Spanish, covered a range of issues, from the growing stratification in modern cities to the rise of NIMBYism, or the "not-in-my-back-yard" vein of thought. Victor and Ian, along with their panelists, spoke of a phenomenon which is not at all new: the exclusion of lower-inco...

During the month of April, as part of a continuation of my Families Forward Grant project, I began to research the topic of global childcare, in preparation for an article I'll be publishing during the month of May. The research I've been conducting and the information I've gleaned has been illuminating, and it's clear that the system of childcare in the United States leaves many families with few options. There are many countries with systems of childcare more comprehensive and accessible than ours, and at the same time, there are developing countries that struggle with issues of childcare on a much larger, more grave scale. According to ODI.org, there were 671 million children under the age of five in 2016, and the number has obviously only continued to grow since. Around the globe, the domestic work of women, including child-rearing, goes uncompensated, and women continue to bear an enormous burden, as only a very small percentage of the world's population can af...