“The goal is not to do business with people who need what you have, they need to believe in what you believe.”

Belief is vital to all success. Ever since we were younger, we were taught that believing in something leads to success, because when you believe you push yourself to achieve greatness, which leads you to eventually accomplish great things. Your personal beliefs come from deep inside you, they are the things that when you do a gut check day in and day out never change. Truly effective leaders know this and use it to move their companies and organizations forward. In Simon Sinek’s TedTalk “How Great Leaders Inspire Action” I learned that there is a part of the brain, the lambic sections that are responsible for our feelings. This part of the brain is where we make judgments about trust and loyalty. High quality effective leaders know how to appeal to this part of the brain – this is where decision making happens.

While I struggled to find examples of where young people are having intra/cross cultural conversations to solve the major problems facing our planet, I thought this would be a good time to take a closer look at a program that I have been involved with for the past two years – Project 25, or as it is now known as “Youth Green International”. This collaborative project was started by Peter Lynch (Leader of Green Across the World) and Ken Hood (retired UVM teacher) using the idea that if we are ever going to solve the problems of the world, we need to teach young people to effectively communicate with each other worldwide. Using connections that they had with schools around the world, and input from middle and high school students they formed a partnership between 25 schools that would first work to learn to communicate together and next work to solve an environmental problem together. During the past two years students from my school People’s Academy Middle Level and Peoples Academy High School have attempted to communicate with and learn about students from Senegal, we have raised money to pay for high school exit exams and communicated with students from Kenya and high school Spanish II + III students travelled to a really progressive school in Puerto Rico. What still needs to happen as Sinek shared in the TedTalk is that we need to get to the “why”. I have shared the “what” with you, but I am struggling to get others to buy into the importance of Project 25 and Youth Green International.

Here is my pitch : (Imagine a world where young people are inspired to act on issues facing their local and global communities because they have the confidence and the mindset to communicate effectively with their trusted counter parts a world away.)