Global Citizen Year

For the last decade, I’ve been obsessed with translating my vision for Global Citizen Year into a world-class operation.  We’ve built a talented global team, an award-winning culture, and a life-changing experience that’s launched 1,500 new leaders.

The events of 2020 threatened to derail us, but our team’s resilience transformed unprecedented constraints into a breakthrough. We knew we couldn’t sit on the sidelines as so many pandemics — COVID, racial injustice, and global inequities — raged.  We hustled hard and fast to launch our Academy— initially designed as a “pandemic pivot” but with a growing momentum that has elevated our aspirations tenfold.  In the next decade, we aim to launch 100,000 emerging leaders worldwide — a critical mass to address our shared, global challenges.  

Today we have the team, track-record, and plan to become the world’s launchpad for changemakers. 

Support from the Elevate Prize would be catalytic. The funding will help grow our core programs while ensuring they remain financially accessible; the marketing and media support will be a game-changer in shaping perceptions, policies, and practice to spur a global movement; and the mentorship and network will be an invaluable source of insight, inspiration, and shared learning. 

When I finished high school I was determined to find an experience that would shape my values, identity, and sense of purpose before setting foot on a college campus. I’d been a good student, checked the boxes, and gotten into Stanford. But I knew in my gut something was missing: I had let schooling interfere with my real education.

I spent a year living and working in Brazil and Nicaragua, and the experience built agency, empathy, and courage in ways classroom learning couldn’t have. Ever since, I’ve been fixated on one insight: a formative, global experience on the cusp of adulthood changes people in ways our world needs most. 

While the seeds were planted nearly two decades ago, I spent ten years learning how to build a high-impact venture — apprenticing to leaders in the field and attending Harvard Business Schoolbefore taking the leap to launch an organization. 

Global Citizen Year is the ultimate expression of my values and vision for what education can — and must — become.  Ten years in, I still wake up on fire. I know I’m doing the work I was made for, and I’m thrilled that we’re only just getting started.

The world is experiencing a crisis of leadership. Overcoming our shared, global challenges — from pandemics to our climate crisis — requires a new generation of leaders who are:

• Committed to a purpose beyond themselves
• Equipped to work across lines of difference
• Reflective of society’s diversity

Our experiences — the Fellowship and the Academy — are addressing this crisis by selecting talented and diverse students worldwide and using the formative transition after high school to ignite a lifetime of purposeful leadership. 

The Fellowship: Since 2010, we’ve run a Fellowship for 1,000+ exceptional young people who spend a year before college living and working alongside the global majority in communities across Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Our Alumni are thriving in college and early careers, and credit Global Citizen Year as having given them a sense of purpose and the confidence to work across lines of difference.

The Academy: Our 2020 innovation unlocked a path for exponential impact. The Academy, a first-of-its-kind leadership experience delivered virtually to students worldwide, is accessible and scalable. In our inaugural year, 500 students joined us from 85 countries, and demand for next year has already grown 400%. 

History demonstrates that ideas don’t change the world — leaders do. 

Our most celebrated social change leaders have one thing in common: at an early age, they were shaped by formative experiences proximate to the problems they are now solving. These experiences gave them the context and empathy to see opportunities where others saw challenges.  Our ability to tackle complex global challenges hinges on developing a critical mass of leaders like these. And yet, our current educational paradigms fall perilously short.

To solve our leadership crisis, who we empower as leaders is as important as how they are developed. 

These three pillars are core to our innovation:

• When: We catch young people on the cusp of adulthood — a developmental sweet spot when a young person has the maturity to leave home but hasn’t yet fixed their values or identity.
• How: Our programs shape young people in ways classroom learning cannot by wrapping curriculum, coaching, and a cohort around lived experience.
• Why: Beyond our core programs, we’re launching a movement.  Using our model as a blueprint, we’re partnering with companies, colleges, and governments worldwide so that someday, “Global Citizen Year” is a shared rite-of-passage for the world’s next-generation leaders.

To date, we’ve shaped the life trajectory of 1,500+ young change-makers. Here’s how we’re having an impact:

• Experiences that change lives.  Fellowship alumni return with confidence, purpose, and high proficiency in a new language (91%), and Academy alums show significant gains in empathy, agency, and global perspective. 

• Impact that persists over time.  Our alumni are:

  • Maximizing college. They arrive with the confidence and agency to know why they’re there, and graduate one year faster than the national average.

  • Applying cross-cultural skills.  They feel confident seeing the world through other perspectives (97%) and working across lines of difference (97%). 

  • Engaging as citizens. They demonstrate courage to stand up for their beliefs (94%), and believe it’s their responsibility to challenge inequity in all forms (97%).  

  • Leading change. They’re finding careers that align with their values at top companies and organizations across every sector. 93% believe their work is making a difference in the lives of others (compared to 23% nationally). 

• Catalyzing a paradigm shift.  Direct impact alone cannot scale to the size of the problems we’re solving. Through rigorous research, strategic communications, and policy advocacy, we’re targeting the key levers to transform our educational paradigm in the US -- and beyond.  

Since our founding, Global Citizen Year has been on a mission to fix our leadership crisis by transforming the composition, operating system, and impact of future leaders.

This year, we’re directly impacting the lives of 1,500 emerging leaders across the globe, and our rate of growth predicts that by next year, we will have doubled the number of young people we serve.  

With our new Global Citizen Academy, we have developed a platform to dramatically scale our reach. The experience is designed for growth and will benefit from economies of scale as enrollment increases.  In our first year alone, we were overwhelmed by interest — with a lineup of leading influencers — including Melinda Gates, Seth Godin, DeRay McKesson, Shawn Mendes, and Varshini Prakash — who are eager to share their story with our students and grow the impact of the Academy. And, as colleges rethink “normal” in light of COVID-19,  we’re in conversation with a dozen leading schools around opportunities for joint admission, credit, and financial aid.   

By 2030, our audacious aim is to launch a critical mass of 100,000 new leaders with the insights, skills, and networks needed to build a more just and sustainable world.

Looking back…

To date, we’ve supported more than 1,500 young people through our transformative learning experiences. Our students join us to learn about themselves, the world, and their place in it — and the data shows it’s working. See 2020 Alumni Outcomes report for our learning goals and results.

Today…

In the face of our complex global challenges, young people are hungry to get in the arena and start building a better future. Ultimately, we’re re-imagining a transition to adulthood that harnesses this determination by: 

• Centering equity and multilateral exchange 

• Focusing on learning through real-world experience

• Weaving together the public and private sectors, creating a global network of young people ready to cooperate across industries to advance innovative solutions 

• Nurturing a new generation of citizens with the experience, empathy, and language skills needed to navigate the interconnected world of the 21st century 

Looking forward…

We have the track record and team to scale our solution to the size of our shared global challenges. See our two-year Catalyst Fund to learn how we’re investing to build a better future — a future shaped by a generation of leaders on a mission to overcome the world’s most intractable challenges.

• Driving Visibility: Our ultimate goal — to unleash a critical mass of new leaders globally — requires reaching a new level of mainstream visibility.  While we’ve had early success sharing our story, we’re ready to take our thought-leadership to the next level.  

• Building Global Networks: Our first decade focused on building a Fellowship that primarily supported young leaders from the U.S. Our new Academy has dramatically expanded the scope of our aspirations. Today, we aim to become the world’s launchpad for our next-generation changemakers.  Doing this requires a global coalition of cross-sector partners — from mission-aligned companies like airlines to provide operational capacity around travel, to NGOs able to provide apprenticeships worldwide, to governments that provide credibility and institutional support.

One strategy for overcoming the first barrier has been through our Speaker Series, which has attracted participation by innovators who are elevating our brand and visibility. We are simultaneously working with consultants at CIVITAS and Incandescent on a blueprint for expanding our impact exponentially. 

Winning the Elevate Prize would be catalytic in expanding our network by giving us access to financial, human, and social capital to amplify our stories and inspire others to join our emerging, global coalition.

This “fanbase” is the key to getting our impact flywheel spinning, creating a virtuous cycle that drives demand, impact, and momentum.  We’ve developed this visual to capture the power of this virtuous cycle. 

My approach to building a leadership team can’t be separated from my own journey toward understanding power and privilege. I was well into my 30’s before I began to investigate my blindspots as a white woman leading an exceptionally diverse team — and the process has humbled me like no other.  

Our leadership team (which is >50% BIPOC, a percentage that holds at all levels of the organization) is deeply committed to approaching our work with an equity lens. This focus is supported by a range of practices: trainings with National Equity Project and Inclusion Design Group, a team visit to the EJI museum, an internal “racial justice council,” and a quarterly “pulse check” for staff to share candid feedback on our performance.

I feel proud of the progress I have made so far, and know it’s a journey that will never end.  While I feel a deep sense of loss that racial development was not central to my education, this disconnect — between what our schools teach and what young people most need to learn — is part of what fuels my commitment to launch a generation of diverse leaders who can’t NOT lead with an equity lens.

Guiding Global Citizen Year to its full potential isn’t a passing interest — it’s my life’s work.  

My experiences as a young person living and working in communities across Latin America, Asia, and Southern Africa committed me to the importance of proximate leadership — and to the developmental magic of providing young people with real-world experiences that shape their identity… before they make crucial choices about the rest of their lives.  

Ever since I’ve been on a mission to make a formative global experience the norm for young people from all backgrounds.  

Recognizing the limits of my own experience, I’ve prioritized building a team whose diversity is reflective of our participants and of the global communities where we operate. 

While we’ve always been grounded by a commitment to access, in our early years we uncovered discrepancies in outcomes between our white Fellows and those who self-identified as BIPOC. This data-informed a set of crucial changes in program design that have enabled us to close the gap in recent years. 

In our next chapter, I’m confident that our commitment to equity will position us to empower a generation of proximate, values-oriented leaders equipped to change the world — for good. 

Last year, knowing it wouldn't be responsible to run a global Fellowship in a pandemic, we pivoted hard and fast to launch an accessible offering designed specifically for our current moment. I recorded a short video (2 mins) that outlines the journey behind our “pandemic pivot” — a case study in how unexpected constraints, humility, and letting go of what we think we know can make way for unexpected breakthroughs.

https://abbyfalik.com/speaking/

Financial support from the Elevate Prize would be instrumental in allowing us to invest in areas that amplify our impact but have been historically underfunded and under-leveraged.  Specifically, we would make crucial investments in: 

1. Thought leadership: Enlisting the support of experts at West Wing Writers to help me develop, express, and amplify my ideas.  I’m eager to utilize my experience and perspective to shape an urgent, national conversation around the future of learning — and how we can redefine success for our next generation. 

2. Digital Storytelling: Additional resources enable new investments in content that elevates our Alumni voices.  We have a plan to increase our presence and influence on TikTok, YouTube, Clubhouse, and Instagram in order to inspire 1M members of GenZ to re-define learning, leadership, and success on their own terms. 

We’ve established robust recruitment pipelines to identify talented and diverse candidates for the Academy and Fellowship. Some of our recruitment partners include:

• College-access organizations: College Track and Global Glimpse
• School Districts: Chicago Public Schools and DC Public Schools
• High Schools: United World Colleges, African Leadership Academy, and Rise

We work with a number of groups around curriculum design and development including:

• National Equity Project
• Inclusion Design Group
• Minerva Project

Additionally, we have relationships with more than a dozen colleges including: 

• Tufts University
• Duke University
• Princeton University 
•  University of Notre Dame 
•  University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill 
•  Colby College 
•  University of Chicago

For a full list of current partners see: https://www.globalcitizenyear.org/partners-and-supporters/