International Model UN

Chris Talamo is the Executive Director of IMUNA, where he organizes the largest high school Model United Nations (MUN) conference and organizes training sessions and resources used by students around the world. Chris’s work is focused on expanding access to high-quality MUN experiences that engage students and teach them about the values of the UN. His work has connected him to schools in over 70 countries with students from many socioeconomic backgrounds. Chris’s participation in MUN started when he was a freshman in high school, attending conferences for four years before focusing on conference organization while attending Dartmouth College. After college, he founded a nonprofit organization that helped high schools start their own local, affordable Model UN conferences, opening MUN access to more students. Professionally, Chris has also worked as a management consultant and as a classroom teacher.

There are around 1.2 billion youth ages 15-24 around the world, but the vast majority are not being educated about global issues. Many of those that do learn about global issues still don’t know how they can personally make a difference to address them. Our organization creates Model UN conferences that provide this missing education and connect students to a broad network of NGOs, UN leaders, and entrepreneurs creating meaningful change. We know first-hand the impact this can have through our flagship conference in New York. However, many students simply cannot afford the travel and lodging costs to attend our New York conference, excluding vast groups of less affluent students. Our project will reproduce the unique environment of our New York conference in 8-10 cities around the world, making high-quality global issues education available to all students and empowering them to become agents of change for the SDGs.

Young people are preparing to enter an increasingly global and interconnected world. They can chat with their peers halfway around the world, and issues like COVID-19 and human trafficking touch every community. However, only a few countries have integrated global issues education into their formal curricula, and less than half of the world is even aware of the Sustainable Development Goals. Model UN seeks to address this issue by making global citizenship education fun and engaging. By representing diverse countries in debate on real issues before the UN, students develop an appreciation for the successes and challenges that governments and NGOs face every day. We know this education makes a difference on students’ mindsets. One project by PwC found that after students in Dubai learned about the SDGs, 92% of them reported that they cared more about social and environmental issues. Unfortunately, MUN is also an expensive program inaccessible to many students. Conferences can cost hundreds or thousands of dollars to attend, and many students do not have access to quality local conferences. Therefore, IMUNA is working to take the outstanding experience that we provide students in New York and make that experience available in cities around the world.

IMUNA already runs the world’s largest and most prestigious MUN conference in New York City, which we offer at the lowest possible price point in order to cover the costs of operating the event. However, the costs of traveling to and lodging in New York, which we cannot help our students control, are much higher than this and prevent countless students from participating. We want to make this immersive experience available in other cities so that every student has access to high-quality global citizenship education regardless of where they live. Starting a new conference in a foreign country poses many challenges. There are legal and administrative requirements that must be satisfied, often by a lawyer or other expert. To make the conference representative of the city and country that hosts it, the top Model UN delegates must also be recruited as conference volunteers to lead the committees. To provide a level of deep immersion into the UN system, the staff must also build relationships with the local embassies and international NGO offices. Although there are many steps to organizing a new conference, making a conference available locally opens up incredible opportunities to students from all socioeconomic backgrounds.

Our primary audience is secondary school students, although we also work closely with their teachers as well. We have extensive experience working with students in this age group through our New York conference, which involves thousands of students each year. We prepare hundreds of pages of heavily-sourced research materials for them each year and run training sessions online and in-person to prepare students for the conference. We have seen the impact that participation in NHSMUN has had on these students who have provided us with testimonials like this: “I would genuinely recommend this conference to any of my friends interested in MUN as it was an incredible life-changing experience for me.” Our international participants have often asked us if we run or could recommend conferences closer to them, as the cost of flying to and staying in New York is prohibitive to many low-income students. Unfortunately, in many cases, there are no high-quality local or regional MUN conferences available. By opening up our own conferences using our outstanding resources and our guiding philosophy of creating an immersive experience, we want to serve the vast number of students who can’t afford to make the trip to New York City.

If we are to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals, we will need to tap into the vast and largely untapped potential of young people. Unfortunately, most curricula don’t even teach the SDGs, and the concept of global citizenship education is still emerging. Our project not only builds awareness of the SDGs among youth, but it also connects them to a global network of UN organizations, NGOs, and activists as well. This way, while they are learning about the SDGs, they are also learning about what they as individuals can do to make progress towards them.

Our project is largely motivated by requests from the people that attend our New York conference. While we have grown to become the world’s largest MUN conference, the fact remains that due to travel and accommodation costs, a conference in New York will never be accessible to a median-income family in most countries. Many of the schools that have come to New York from places like Bogota, Lagos, London, Mexico City, New Delhi, and Santiago (among many others) have told us that they have students just as smart and passionate, but those students could not attend because of cost. They love the unique and immersive environment of our New York conference, but they also need local conferences that more of their students can participate in. We are often asked to recommend other conferences, but unfortunately, many MUN conferences are focused solely on the debate aspect of MUN or may not even talk about global issues at all. Therefore, we started to talk to the schools about opening up new conferences in their area, which was met with incredible enthusiasm.

Throughout my childhood, MUN played a pivotal part in my education and maturation. When I first joined MUN as a student at 13, I was very shy and struggled to connect with the people around me. I was and still am an introvert, but I didn’t have any of the tools I needed to build meaningful relationships, personal or professional. MUN gave me a voice to approach challenges well beyond just global issues; it helped me tackle matters of family, faith, and wellness as well. As I became older and started to run conferences more often than I would participate in them, MUN continued to help me grow in even more ways. It taught me about empathetic leadership and how to build teams, but it also helped me grapple with my own anxiety and depression. Of course, the role that MUN plays in solving global issues is still deeply important to me, but MUN did more to shape me than any other school program possibly could. I consider it a personal mission to make sure that as many students have the option to participate in MUN as well.

I have 15 years of experience organizing conferences of all types and sizes all over the world. From 2012 to 2016, I helped high schools start and sustain their own local, affordable MUN conferences. These conferences ranged from 50 to 200 students each, and I saw how beginner students access MUN for the first time. I have also run the world’s largest conferences, first as a volunteer from 2009 to 2011 and since 2016 as a full-time professional. I know the challenges that face such a large operation and I know how to deliver exceptional customer service to people from diverse countries and cultures. I have also helped start conferences in many different countries, sometimes as an organizer and sometimes as a consultant. While I never stop learning new things, I have seen all of the most common obstacles that can prevent a new conference from being successful. Through this experience, I have also created and collected tools to organize the process of creating educational materials and managing conference registrants. Because I also want to make the process of creating conferences more accessible, I have worked to make many of these tools publicly available and easy for non-technical people to use. One such project is mydais.org, a free website that provides tools like registration management, country assignments, and student research paper collection.

Whenever a crisis comes up at our New York conference, I always try to prioritize the student experience. Each year, we arrange for the students to visit the UN General Assembly Hall for either the opening or closing ceremonies, often one of the students’ most memorable experiences. This year, with only three weeks until the conference, we found that the only available time was right in the middle of the conference when we typically arranged for students to visit the UN Permanent Missions of the country they were representing at the conference. Not wanting to deprive students of either the UN Mission visit or the GA Hall, we set out to reschedule as many of the over 100 mission briefings as possible. Thankfully, many missions were accommodating, and many of those that couldn’t reschedule offered to have virtual meetings when the students returned home. For the GA Hall, we worked with one of our close UN partners to set up an incredible experience in which students would be able to ask questions directly to UN diplomats. Although we didn’t get the chance to have an impressive ceremony, we were still able to create memorable and educational experiences for the students.

From 2012 to 2016, I founded an organization called Education in Motion, which helped high school start and sustain their own local, affordable MUN conferences. When I first started, there were a small number of local conferences operating in New York City, but these were hosted by typically high-performing schools. Although these students were in the shadow of the UN Headquarters, many students still had no access to Model UN. By reaching out to schools across the city, I was able to find passionate groups of students at schools that were not among the MUN elite. By helping these schools to start their own conferences and building a network with the schools that already had conferences, I was able to help build a true community of local MUN programs across the city. This community included schools from all five boroughs with students who had very different academic and socioeconomic profiles. The teachers also built their own community, promising to attend each other’s conferences and sharing resources as needed. Although I have moved on to new projects, this MUN community still thrives, now serving an entirely new generation of students.

For decades, MUN is an activity that has required participants to travel great distances. As such, MUN has also become an upper-class activity, with disadvantaged students left out of most of the major conferences. Most conferences today are also organized by university students, largely as fundraisers for their university-level MUN program. Therefore, these conferences often have no interest in growing outside of their campus. Some communities don’t even have access to university-run programs. Instead, high school students have to organize their own MUN conferences. Because the students are so young, the research and educational materials produced are often of lower quality. Together, these factors mean that the MUN that low-income students can only access lower-quality experiences than their wealthy peers. IMUNA is one of the very few independently run conferences and is widely recognized for its academic excellence. Our mission is global, and we run MUN conferences for the educational value of the activity. By bringing the elite educational experience found in New York to cities around the world, we are giving more students access to the same opportunities that the most privileged students enjoy. We’re also uniquely positioned to bring our world-class network of UN and NGO speakers to our new conferences, and students and teachers alike can enjoy extensive research materials as they prepare for debate. For the students fortunate enough to be able to afford travel, they can continue to see the world. But accessibility to us means bringing educational opportunity to students where they are.

At first glance, MUN is a debate activity not unlike parliamentary debate or Lincoln-Douglas debate. However, these formats are largely adversarial—two-sided debates where one team wins and the other loses. This polarized style tends to value logical and public speaking skills. These skills are important, but when tackling real-world problems, it takes far more than just impressive rhetoric. MUN is different because it is a collaborative form of debate. When discussing a topic like child labor, all countries are invested in the goal of eliminating child labor, but they disagree on the most equitable way to do so. In fact, most MUN debates are not about proving one side right. Instead, delegates negotiate to find a solution that everyone can agree upon. MUN still teaches students about effective public speaking, but it also teaches them about diplomacy, negotiation, and leadership. Students bring each other up rather than tear each other down. However, skills-oriented learning is only a short-term impact. Students develop a deep understanding of global issues, but they often don’t know what they can do to address them. Therefore, the other educational goal of our conferences is to equip students with the skills needed to turn their knowledge into activism. We invite guest speakers, NGOs, and UN representatives to share with students what other young people are doing and inspire them to do their part. Sometimes, this action can be small, like a local fundraiser or advocacy campaign. Other students have helped replant forests and influence legislation. Whatever their action is, they use the collaboration and leadership skills they learned from MUN to bring communities together, starting a virtuous cycle of activism. As their projects grow, they expose their peers to these issues and inspire them to act as well. Some of these students may even participate in MUN, starting the cycle anew. In this way, MUN is a vehicle for engaging students with global issues like the SDGs. Considering that there are 1.2 billion people ages 15–24 around the world, we will need their passion and energy if we are to achieve the ambitious 2030 Agenda.

Currently, about 5,200 students participate in our New York conference in-person in March. There are many more students who use our freely-available research and preparation guides online, although it’s difficult to get a precise number of students because we cannot track how those are downloaded and shared. Next year, we hope to have started our first new conference based in Mexico City, as there are a large number of passionate MUN students throughout Mexico. In the first year of the conference, we hope to reach between 600 and 1,000 students (in addition to the 5,000 students in New York). Over the next five years, there are a number of cities and countries that we have considered for additional conferences, including Chile, Colombia, India, Nigeria, South Africa, and the United Kingdom. With the right network and funding, we could have 10 or more new conferences operating five years from now. Combined with our New York conference, IMUNA could be directly serving more than 20,000 students attending our conferences with countless more benefiting from our resources and classroom tools.

Over the next year, our goal is to prove the concept behind our project and raise funds to accelerate and expand it. The first international conference that we are opening is already being developed in Mexico City. It was originally scheduled for October 2020, however, the onset of COVID-19 has forced us to postpone it. We are currently considering options for moving the conference online. We are also hoping to raise funding to open 8-10 new conferences around the world over the next few years. Although we are able to use the small surplus provided by NHSMUN over many years to provide seed funding for our conference in Mexico, that surplus will never allow us to grow at the rate that our partner schools are asking for new conferences. Additional funding would allow us to speed up our timeline from opening one conference every few years to opening multiple conferences every year. Over the next five years, we hope to have an array of international conference opportunities available on every continent serving 10 or more cities. With less funding, we could open fewer conferences. However, we believe that the demand for quality global issues education could easily support these conferences and make them financially viable.

The most significant barrier to opening new conferences around the world is funding. Building relationships, recruiting volunteers, and taking care of legal and administrative matters all require initial funding to realize. Many direct expenses also need to be incurred before the conference takes place, so even if the conference breaks even with delegate revenue, initial funding is still needed for venue deposits and student materials. However, because we would be working internationally, the legal hurdles are also quite significant. Registering as a non-profit or finding a non-profit partner is a major undertaking in most countries, which is often complicated by language barriers. There are also typically requirements for insurance coverage or legal protections for students that must be taken into consideration as well. Any conference that we start abroad would require us to have a close partner on the ground to help us navigate these challenges. The materials that we produce would also need to be translated into the students’ preferred language abroad, and our volunteer staff may or may not have the language skills to do that work.

Because our New York conference is already attended by students from over 60 countries, we already have relationships with people and organizations around the world. This will help us raise awareness of the new conferences quickly and will help provide us with initial volunteers for the conference. These local partners should also be able to help connect us with experts in each of our target locations that can handle the regulatory and legal hurdles required to start a new operation. However, part of the goal of these new conferences is to reach new communities and more diverse students. We want to recruit volunteers from different schools and organizations to make the conference truly representative of the city and country that hosts the conference. To do this, we’ll need to connect with other organizations operating in the area and prepare something like an advertising campaign to recruit new volunteers or even local board members. Regarding funding, we are pursuing a number of different funding opportunities, largely from major organizations and individual donors. We have received grants for specific US-based programs before, but because these are new international projects that require more operational funding, we are focusing our fundraising efforts on these types of organizations.

We regularly work with many organizations in various capacities. We have close relationships with other MUN conferences based in New York, and we have a quarterly phone call to share best practices and challenges with each other. We also work with school networks and educational organizations abroad to help start new MUN programs or help prepare students for our New York conference. It is through conversations with these partners that we have determined that there is a demand for conferences like NHSMUN in their home countries. We also enjoy strong relationships with various organizations at the United Nations, including formal association with the Department of Global Communications (DGC), which manages the UN’s education outreach programs. The DGC regularly helps provide us with outstanding guest speakers at our conferences, allowing delegates to ask questions directly to senior UN leaders. We support DGC by helping them raise awareness of the Sustainable Development Goals and connecting them with schools that have MUN programs when they have pilot programs they would like to test. Overall, we want our conferences to be a “marketplace of ideas” between students and the UN System that they study so closely.

Our organization’s mission is to provide exceptional global issues education to students wherever they may be. As discussed in other responses, we know firsthand the power of MUN to make students more aware of their culture and other cultures around the world, developing a stronger sense of personal responsibility for global issues. Historically, our business model has been to grow our flagship New York City conference, but no matter how much we cut fees, the cost of travel and accommodation is insurmountable for many families. Therefore, our new business model will be to create conferences abroad that will provide the New York experience to those families. Having an excellent conference available near their homes will make high-quality MUN and global issues education available to them, maybe for the first time, without a severe financial burden. Schools will be able to have more students participate in nearby conferences, and if more students attend from each school, it is more likely that those students will share their newfound awareness of global issues with their peers. It will also benefit our NGO and UN partners because it will give them increased opportunities to engage with youth around the world (and not just the wealthiest among them). We want to make conferences that are a marketplace of ideas, serving everyone who chooses to participate in them.

Our New York conference is already financially sustainable, but because we must work every year to minimize the cost of attending, there is not a surplus to fund new conferences. Students and schools pay fees to attend, which covers the basic costs of operating the conference. These fees are discounted or waived in cases of financial need, although again, a major challenge is that we cannot defray the costs of travel or accommodations. Our new conferences abroad will also charge a fee, although we plan for those fees to be much lower than our New York conference. These conferences will also make financial aid available to low-income families in the area, and without sizable travel or accommodation costs, we hope that those discounts will actually make attending the conference accessible to them. Because of the high start-up costs for the conference, we expect that the conference won’t be profitable in at least the first year, which is why having seed money for these conferences is so important. As the conference grows, there is also additional revenue that can be provided by sponsors, although this funding source is also one that grows over time. However, over time, our goal is for each new conference to be sustainable in a similar way to our New York conference, with fees covering the costs of operating the conference and discounts for students who need it.

Our New York conference provides nearly all of our revenue. School and delegate fees amount to approximately $500,000 each year (which includes the discounts and scholarships offered to low-income schools). However, as discussed below, nearly all of this revenue is used to pay for the expenses required to run the conference each year, leaving an inadequate surplus for other projects. Additionally, there is also about $20,000 that is raised through conference sponsorships from other organizations, although this is small in comparison to the amount of the delegate fees. Now that we are planning to grow our operations internationally, we are seeking grants and donations to make these new conferences possible.

Overall, we are seeking $500,000 by the start of 2022 to cover the costs of creating 8–10 new conferences abroad. We hope to secure this through a combination of grants and major gifts. Although we could open fewer conferences with less funding, we have numerous potential conference sites that we have been studying, and we hope to be able to serve the students in each of those communities. Some of this funding will be used to cover the steep startup and overhead costs associated with starting a new business in another country. Furthermore, because most of the costs of a MUN conference are incurred before any school or delegate fees are received, this funding will also be used to help make sure that our cash flow remains neutral. These new conferences may incur a loss in their first year or more, but we plan to make each new conference financially sustainable in the long term by charging low fees to participants to cover the costs of operating the conference.

Our estimated expenses for our New York conference are approximately $470,000. The largest components of these expenses are the costs of reserving our venue and meeting space, the supplies and materials for each of our nearly 6000 student and teacher attendees, and the travel and lodging costs for our nearly 200 volunteer staff members who power the conference. We also have costs related to running and hosting our websites, maintaining adequate insurance coverage, as well as subscriptions and platforms used to publish our thousands of pages of preparation guides, research materials, and digital resources developed by our volunteers. As you can see from our funding overview above, our budget is extremely tight and only allows for us to cover our existing expenses. In order to reach the large community not able to afford the travel and lodging expenses associated with New York, we are deeply in need of funding to allow us to offer our proven transformative experience to youth in other cities and countries around the world.

Of course, one of the primary reasons we are applying for The Elevate Prize is to help us overcome these financial barriers and serve students as quickly as possible. Although we could take a slower approach to growth, we have already identified many communities that are more than capable of sustaining a MUN conference and whose students are looking for new opportunities to learn about global issues right now. We want to be able to reach those students now rather than make them wait ten years or more. We are also very interested in being part of the network of Elevate Prize winners, who we hope will be able to support us and who we hope to be able to support ourselves through our conferences. As mentioned, we want to create conferences that are a marketplace of ideas, so if other Elevate Prize winners are overseeing projects that would benefit from strong and energetic global youth participation, then we would love to welcome them into our events. We would also benefit from having new board members join our organization. We are largely a volunteer organization of university students with only a few graduated professionals overseeing the organization as a whole. Having board members who were more experienced with fundraising and international expansion would be extremely helpful as we advance towards our long-term goals.

Historically, our organization’s board members have been drawn from the most active and passionate volunteers from our conference. This has been helpful in some ways, as we have very active board members. However, because they are typically younger, their networks and fundraising capacity is typically much lower. We would love to connect with potential board members that would connect us with the philanthropic world outside of the UN and help our organization become more sustainable.

We enjoy strong relationships with many offices of the UN, but because many offices operate largely independently, there are still many offices we have not built relationships with. Examples of offices that we do not have relationships with include DPKO, OHCHR, and UNDP. We also are looking to create partnerships with international organizations working towards the SDGs that exist outside of the UN as well. Examples of these organizations include Amnesty International, CARE International, MSF, and Mercy Corps. Although the scale of our organization is much smaller than those examples, we believe that our conferences could play a key role in activating the energy of young people to volunteer and support larger organizations.