The Summer School is a unique space for learning and collaborating that welcomes a diversity of participants, speakers and educators from a wide range of contexts. In this space, diverse perspectives, experiences and epistemologies contribute to greater understanding and respect among people, encourage new thinking, and inspire context-sensitive action and solutions.
The conviction that young people are drivers of positive social change is the basis for the UNAOC-EF Summer School. This weeklong summer school brings together 75 individuals aged 18-35 from across the globe, to address pressing global challenges in the context of cultural and religious diversity.
The Summer School is a unique space for learning and collaborating that welcomes a diversity of participants, speakers and educators from a wide range of contexts. In this space, diverse perspectives, experiences and epistemologies contribute to greater understanding and respect among people, encourage new thinking, and inspire context-sensitive action and solutions.
The UNAOC-EF Summer School: Youth for positive social change
The conviction that young people are drivers of positive social change is the basis for the UNAOC-EF Summer School. This weeklong summer school brings together 75 individuals aged 18-35 from across the globe, to address pressing global challenges in the context of cultural and religious diversity.
Topics covered during the Summer School
The curriculum delivered as part of the UNAOC – EF Summer School helps to address issues at the core of the United Nations’ mandate: peace and security, development, human rights, humanitarian affairs, and international law. More precisely, given the specific mandate of UNAOC to improve cross-cultural understanding and cooperation among countries, peoples and communities and EF’s mission of opening the world through education, the focus will be on global challenges linked to intercultural dialogue and understanding.
The interactive program of workshops, discussions and site visits immerses participants in knowledge and action around cultural and religious diversity: how to better understand it, manage it, promote it and leverage it to shape a world that is healthier, safer, more peaceful and inclusive. Different approaches are applied, including advocacy, narratives, multimedia, negotiation, theater, and social entrepreneurship.
Some of the questions we explore during the week
- How can we build alliances in and across our communities and rally people to our cause?
- What happens when culture is marginalized? What tools can we develop to address this?
- How can we reduce identity-based tensions and collaborate across differences?
- How can one further develop as a leader and agent of social change and sustain this effort?
- How can we develop and grow strong international networks of committed individuals?
- How can the United Nations and young people work together to address conflict and build lasting peace?
- How does New York City leverage its diversity? How do communities organize, promote greater intercultural harmony, and advocate for social justice and equality of opportunities? How does this speak to other contexts?