MUN@Home: Connecting Global Youth

Lisa Martin is the Founder and Executive Director of MUN Impact and Online Model United Nations. She has spent the past two decades building and developing MUN programs, leadership events and summits, and online programs for middle and high school students.

From 2014-2018 she was the Director of THIMUN Qatar, quadrupling the size of the program and introducing Arabic MUN and an international Middle School conference to the program. Prior to her time in Doha, she worked in Malaysia, the United Arab Emirates, and Jordan. She is a global leader in the Model United Nations community, at the forefront of numerous global initiatives and programs with the aim of fostering greater diversity and inclusiveness in Model United Nations. She is also the founding advisory member of Hope for Education and Leadership in Afghanistan.

As the world's 1.5 billion youth entered lock-down due to the pandemic, in-person Model UN conferences, youth leadership conferences, SDG training, and community service projects have ground to a halt. MUN@Home was developed to meet the needs of housebound and disengaged youth with a central focus on the SDGs. We have three goals which the Elevate Prize would help us achieve: 1. Scale our program from 1600 students to 50,000 to 600,000, 2. Increase the number of support staff and further develop our curriculum and other educational materials, and 3. Further immerse ourselves into the United Nations system so our students can be the voice of youth who interact with policymakers. MUN@Home elevates humanity as it educates youth on the world's most pressing issues, activates global youth networks for positive change, and empowers students to take direct action to achieve the SDGs.

Due to the pandemic, almost all activities related to Model UN and SDG education ground to a halt. Students lost their ability to come together at school to work with their teachers and fellow students to learn the valuable skills related to MUN and the SDGs. Furthermore, all in-person events, such as MUN conferences, community service projects, and guest speaker presentations, have been cancelled indefinitely as the world copes with the Covid-19 crisis. It is estimated that over 500,000 students actively participate in MUN globally and the number of students who are involved in work related to the SDGs is incalculably high, in the tens of millions at least. MUN Impact has played to its strengths as a trusted source of trusted online programming to develop its MUN@Home program. MUN@Home gives a platform to students to meet virtually, participate in MUN events and activities, and to contribute valuable work to achieving the SDGs. 

MUN@Home is an asynchronous learning activity which brings together middle and high school students from around the world to learn about the SDGs, MUN, and valuable research and presentation skills. The program is divided into 4-week rounds which focus on a specific SDG Target and lessons are posted in online classrooms where experienced high school students serve as mentors to delegates, providing feedback and guidance. Every week we host Zoom sessions where our students can interact with experts on the highlighted SDG Target, student activists, and each other. MUN@Home is a student-led program with 300 highly-engaged youth leaders who run the bulk of our activities. Due to the global nature of our organization, work is done around-the-clock in just about every timezone. By leveraging technology platforms, we are able to deliver MUN & SDG programming to those who would otherwise be unable to afford it. All of our programming is 100% free to students. Our goal is to reach out to young individuals from all corners of the Earth; to inform, inspire and empower the youth of today to be proactive and take action on the SDGs for a better tomorrow.

MUN@Home serves the 1.5 billion global youth who have been stuck at home because of the pandemic. Specifically, it is estimated that over 500,000 students actively participate in MUN globally and the number of students who are involved in work related to the SDGs is incalculably high, in the tens of millions at least. In four months, MUN@Home has reached 1600 students in 90+ countries, but our vision is much grander. Emerging networks looking to focus on SDG action have organically galvanized around MUN@Home’s global community. Through mentoring and resource sharing, new hubs of engaged students who are focused on the SDGs have blossomed in Nigeria (some classrooms with dirt floors), Ecuador, Afghanistan and Georgia, places where knowledge and action of both have been absent. By being the platform for youth to come together and discuss action they can take in support of the SDGs, the MUN Impact leadership team is able to communicate directly with students to better understand their needs. Students are in a constant conversation with the leadership team and are always sharing their ideas and concerns related to these problems. It is youth who is driving our agenda, and solving their own problems according to need.   

MUN Impact was created to build awareness and drive action to solve the most difficult problems of our world by educating youth on the SDGs and MUN, connecting dynamic youth networks to take action on specific SDG Targets locally and globally, and providing avenues for youth to address leaders at the UN and beyond. MUN Impact’s programming is free to all students and it has a proven track record of supporting communities traditionally left behind (eg. Afghanistan, Nigeria, Ecuador, and Georgia). MUN Impact provides a platform for promoting understanding and cooperation among youth of all nationalities, beliefs, and opinions. 

In early March, members of the MUN Impact Board of Directors met in New York to participate in NHSMUN, the largest MUN conference in North America. We met with contacts at the UN, held meetings about a planned Summit in Morocco, and planned out funding and expansion plans moving forward. Little did we know that within hours of our departure, the first catastrophic wave of COVID-19 cases would hit NYC. Energized by a week of meetings, and like students, trapped at home and tethered to our computers, we began to build MUN@Home. We took seriously the words of the UN’s Deputy Secretary-General, Amina Mohamed, that the world urgently needed no-cost academic opportunities for the 1.5 billion youth out of school. MUN@Home became the rocket fuel for growth and expansion in all parts of MUN Impact.

The litmus test of success was the degree to which students would want to be involved in MUN@Home. Our signups brought a strong response,  triggering a creative explosion in the students themselves, who we believe took great joy and solace in what they were building as the rest of the world, and their own communities quickly sank into uncertainty and disruption.

We understand how much Model UN means to students, for many a highlight of their high school experience. That, taken with the tragic educational impact of the Pandemic provided an opportunity for MUN Impact to play to its strengths-online engagement and youth leadership. We did not anticipate the popularity of the program, nor the enormous impact its creation would have on other programs within MUN Impact. It has catalyzed a global network of youth to not only learn and debate, but also actively think about ways to take action. It imbues hope because our participants ARE planning on a day that is not defined by COVID-19. They are trying to build it now. This has led to the rapid emergence of a Spanish language program, MUNenC@sa, and has seen our global leadership team expand from a dozen to over 300 high school students in a matter of months. We have served over 1600 students from 90 nations. We know we are onto something!

It’s one thing for kids to learn academic skills or about the SDGs, but when they participate in MUN@Home and feel HOPEFUL and POSITIVE about their world? That is the magic we are committed to expanding.

MUN Impact and its MUN@Home project grew out of an older Online Model United Nations program, developed in 2011 by MUN Impact’s Founder and Executive Director Lisa Martin. For nine years this remained the only online MUN program in the world. While MUN Impact’s founding premise has been one of community action, the Pandemic took MUN Impact back to its roots: online programming, online youth engagement, and online youth leadership and networking. This has lead to a parallel explosion of online leadership and program growth in other MUN Impact programs, resulting in the growth of other core programs including a fully online international summit in late July (1,300+ delegates, 70+ unique workshops over three days, an embedded Spanish-language mini-conference with live interpretation). Every part of this elaborate online project has required multiple teams, elaborate workflows, and genuine student leadership. Students and teachers involved in this project bring years of experience to these projects, with young and not-so-young adults working in a highly collaborative way to build programs in the face of adversity.

MUN Impact is uniquely positioned to execute online programs that are innovative, student-driven, and engaging and executed quickly under pressure.

On September 20, 2019 I suffered a critical loss of intellectual property which pushed me to the brink of my ability to continue to develop MUN Impact. The platform which we use to build all of our learning materials began to automatically delete everything I had created, in real-time, right before my eyes. Within a few seconds, over 160 hours of work had vanished and and there was no way to recover it. To make matters worse, I was set to leave three days later to travel to the UN in New York to present our new materials to UN Officials and educators. At that moment I went into a tailspin and thought MUN Impact would never recover. I went for a walk to clear my mind. I returned home and began seeing chatter from different students online: a new debate topic for O-MUN, reports of a successful MUN conference run in Kabul, and an email from a youth-group wanting to collaborate. I realized that the students were going to continue, no matter what. I buckled down, reached out to collaborators, and completed the core of my lost materials in 3 days and then successfully presented them in New York.

Lisa Martin and the MUN Impact team are recognized global leaders in the MUN community and have inspired and supported numerous student and MUN  initiatives. In 2014 she identified an opportunity to support a small group of Afghan high school students to travel to Doha, Qatar and participate in a regional MUN conference. The Afghan team was mentored online by students from around the world and was able to fully participate in the conference. Their visit catalyzed the MUN community in Qatar, leading to school to school support of this emerging Afghanistan program. Lisa facilitated conversations between donors, schools, individual students and the Afghan team, and continued to mentor and assist them when they decided to start an NGO specifically designed to promote MUN.The mentoring and support of the Hope for Education and Leadership in Afghanistan (HELA) program further led to invitations for these students to attend UN events in New York and Vienna, as well as a successful grant award by the US Embassy to develop a university MUN program throughout Afghanistan. The HELA program also successfully developed its own Women’s Empowerment Program, run by female delegates so that young Afghan women could learn about entrepreneurship and leadership.

Model UN largely a program that exists at the major conferences that take place around the world. Within the walls of the conference, students are playing the role of countries and engaging closely with the material. However, once the conference is over, the students largely return to their lives, or may just start planning for the next debate and the next conference. MUN Impact is an innovation on the existing MUN network because MUN Impact is focused on educating and motivating students to take action on the issues they are already studying and debating. Only a small number of conferences discuss student impact and action, and few have the capacity to follow students on a long term basis. MUN Impact is unique because we seek to cultivate a sense of personal responsibility for achieving the SDGs within each student and harnessing the vast energy of a global youth movement to make change on a large scale. While conferences are largely concerned with students over a span of 1-4 days, we are concerned with students as they create a future for themselves.

For over 70 years, a growing global movement of students have participated in Model United Nations (MUN), an activity that brings students together to role-play as international diplomats to discuss and solve global issues. MUN is a critical activity for young learners because it encourages empathy and awareness of challenging cross-border issues and fosters collaborative problem-solving. However, while MUN has grown to include millions of participants, it has also become insular and fails to mobilize students towards tangible action on the issues they have learned about. There was a growing need for an organization that will catalyze the evolution of the current MUN ecosystem and harness students’ energy beyond the conference walls to inspire global change at the community level. MUN@Home was created to reach out to students around the world, regardless of their level of experience with MUN, and connect them to both the global MUN community and the work being done to achieve the SDGs. In many cases, MUN@Home is bridging that gap in students’ minds for the first time, as many students have never been taught about the SDGs or asked to take personal action on them before. Unlike many other MUN programs that aim to monetize student participation, MUN@Home’s is offered for free to all students around the world, with no barriers to entry. This has enabled student participation from underdeveloped countries who would otherwise never have such an experience. One participant from India wrote that “MUN@Home was one of the best things that has been a part of my life. I wish I had found this program before.” By coming together to take global action on a grassroots level, students are becoming community ambassadors, planting the seeds to grow an expanding, youth-based movement of future leaders.

Currently, the MUN@Home program has reached 1600 students since its inception in March 2020. Each time we open registration for a new round, we have only increased the number of registrants (and therefore the number of volunteers and support). We’re continuing to grow this program and plan to do so regardless of the direction that COVID takes, as our program offers something unique that the existing conferences and programs do not. By this time next year, our hope is that with funding, we could support a program that is reaching 4000 students per monthly round (48,000-50,000 students per year). Over five years, we want to sustain that growth to reach 50,000 students per round (600,000 students per year). With the large number of students engaged with MUN around the world already, we believe that these goals are ambitious but attainable. MUN@Home has also shown significant indirect impact. Up to 30% of participants are new to MUN and have no background knowledge of the SDGs. In another case in Ibadan Nigeria, participation in the program has spurred the development of local MUN clubs in schools. Each student has the potential to reach 10 or even 100 new students.This has been a model we have already seen in Nigeria.

We have three primary goals for MUN@Home within the next year. First, we want to continue to grow the number of students that participate in the program. There are large numbers of students that participate in MUN around the world who could easily participate in MUN@Home if there was more room in our programs. This brings us to our second goal, increasing the number of support staff and educational materials. We have been incredibly fortunate to rely on an extremely talented group of volunteers to lead our early programs, but this approach is unfortunately not sustainable. We want to bring on more educators and more professionals to make the educational experience even more powerful and to develop more curricular resources that students can refer to long after the online portion of the program is concluded. Finally, we also believe that immersion into the UN System is critically important, so we want to continue to build relationships with key UN organizations and have more UN and NGO speakers in our programs. We have already featured speakers from UNODC, UNHCR, UNDP, UNICEF, UNCTAD, UNEP and the Dept of Global Communications, but the students would benefit from hearing even more perspectives.

Our most significant barrier is finding scale-up funding for our program. We are so fortunate to have had a core group of volunteers that have made the early rounds of MUN@Home so successful. Many of these volunteers have been working full-time hours to get the program off the ground. What we have built enjoys a proven record of success and is extremely scalable, but we need financing to hire full-time staff and unlock that additional growth. We need talented educators to lead each new round, build more educational materials about the UN and the SDGs, and make sure each student can receive individualized support. While finances are the major barrier, there are also technical and legal barriers that exist. Our work focuses on minors, which are subject to additional safety and privacy regulations online. The systems that we are using also would benefit from custom integrations to make our growth even more scalable. For example, students should be able to seamlessly move between Zoom (their “classroom”), Edmodo (their online resource hub), ESRI (where many of our educational materials are hosted), and more. These integrations are possible with publicly available APIs, but we need someone with the technical knowledge to use those resources to benefit our students.

First and most directly, the grant offered to Elevate Prize winners would immediately help provide us with the funding to hire the educators needed to scale our program. This would allow us to serve more students and create more educational materials, as well as pursue new relationships with different parts of the vast UN System. However, we also hope to be selected for the Elevate Prize because we believe that this network represents an incredible opportunity for developing new partnerships and relationships. The SDGs are so critical to global development that they touch many different types of organizations with diverse goals. Our aim is to help energetic youth connect with global organizations that are doing important work, therefore empowering them to take their own action towards the SDGs. Other Elevate Prize winners and partners could also help us with the various legal and technical barriers that we face. We are confident this network will help us solve these challenges internally or can direct us to experts who do, which will make it even easier for our network of students to connect with the world that needs their energy. This will, in turn, benefit the other organizations of the Elevate Prize community, who can tap into the energy of our youth movement to achieve their goals as well.

Strong partnerships have always been important to the growth of our organization, and we are proud to have developed many excellent partnerships with key organizations in the UN system. The staff at the UNODC have been a long-term partner of ours, providing guest speakers for our MUN@Home rounds and even providing friendly advice on how to expand our outreach. We have also been able to help UNODC achieve some of its primary goals, such as outreach targets for their Education for Justice Initiative. Based on this success, we are also reaching out to many other UN offices to develop partnerships with them, which are at various stages of development. We also have extensive connections within the MUN community and know many of the organizers of the world’s largest conferences. This has helped us spread awareness of our programs to a global audience. We have partnered with the Arab Youth Ventures Foundation and UNA-UAE, and have a good working relationship with the UNA-USA organization.

Because we do not charge for our programs, creating a revenue stream (particularly for online access to programs) will not be possible. We have the ability to generate income through the running of traditional Summits and Leadership Camps/Conferences, but those plans are likely postponed indefinitely. MUN Impact will need to secure revenue through a combination of grants and direct donor sponsorships. We believe that the untapped and global MUN alumni population (numbering in the millions) has the significant ability to underwrite our programs. The challenge is that such a network does not exist at present. We are building an Alumni development strategy including a website (already built), community testimonials, and photo sharing and historical MUN participation data collection as well as an Alumni advisory board to assist with this outreach. This is a multi-year project and will not yield immediate results.

MUN Impact has survived on the generosity of volunteers and other individuals who believe in its Mission. Since January 1, the organization has raised approximately $8000 in this manner. No MUN Impact staff or volunteer has ever drawn a salary or received any form of financial remuneration.

We are hoping to generate through grants, direct donations and sponsorships approximately 200,000 USD for 2020. We also have employed a direct marketing company and hope to raise 15-20,000 USD in this manner. Board members are also hosting a Bike-a-thon to raise funds needed immediately for IT needs.

Staffing and IT expenses make up the overwhelming majority of our anticipated expenses.

 $150,000 - full and part-time staff (for program administration, teaching/mentoring, Student/online supervision, and curriculum developers).

$15,000 - platform rental for a new asynchronous hub space for teaching and classes.

$4500 - Expanded video conferencing, professional-level licenses for software, and other tech subscriptions.

$2500 - Website enhancements and security

$10,000 - Marketing and promotion (purchasing of advertisement, direct marketing services).

$15,000 - Legal services and insurance.

First and most directly, the grant offered to Elevate Prize winners would immediately help provide us with the funding to hire the educators needed to scale our program. This would allow us to serve more students and create more educational materials, as well as pursue new relationships with different parts of the vast UN System. However, we also hope to be selected for the Elevate Prize because we believe that this network represents an incredible opportunity for developing new partnerships and relationships. The SDGs are so critical to global development that they touch many different types of organizations with diverse goals. Our aim is to help energetic youth connect with global organizations that are doing important work, therefore empowering them to take their own action towards the SDGs. Other Elevate Prize winners and partners could also help us with the various legal and technical barriers that we face. We are confident this network will help us solve these challenges internally or can direct us to experts who do, which will make it even easier for our network of students to connect with the world that needs their energy. This will, in turn, benefit the other organizations of the Elevate Prize community, who can tap into the energy of our youth movement to achieve their goals as well.

Building durable partnerships is core to MUN Impact's long-term strategy. The organization is already officially partnered with UNODC, but it would like to further immerse itself within the larger UN ecosystem. While we have welcomed presenters from a number of UN agencies, we would like to formally partner with them in order to support their missions and incorporate the voice of youth into their discussions. In return, we would like these offices to take an active role in helping engage our students by developing projects directly with them, inviting students to present their projects in formal settings such as conferences, and by sharing and developing new materials to further our mission. 

MUN Impact relies heavily on robust technology platforms. The organization would like to partner with Google and Zoom and their technologies are crucial to our ability to carry out our programs.