FEBRUARY 2012-WINTER 2015

Global Studies Program

In 2012 I was recruited to launch and develop a new Global Studies program - and I moved from the United States to Japan to make it happen. Over the course of three years I was able to design and develop more than ten original course curricula for students from Asia, Africa and North America. As if the creative freedom that comes from launching a new initiative was not enough, I also was fortunate to be entrusted to found and launch a Tokyo Foundation Funded “Global Studies, Peace and Leadership Summer Seminar”- this became a 5 week international program the included two weeks of Virtual Classrooms, a 1 week Japan based Peace Component (using the Hiroshima A-Bomb memorial week as a learning case study, followed by a 10 day immersion experience with Social Entrepreneurs and communities across India, the Philippines, Thailand and Cambodia- my students then segued into a semester long course "Designing for Social Innovation" where they crafted their own SE ventures leveraging various tools and methods (i.e . business model canvas, storytelling, design thinking, pitching, etc). We ran the pilot in 2012 and iterated and scaled for a 2013 run as well. As a lead for this I was managing multiple cross-cultural teams, field budgets and stakeholders including a media team to capture some of the impact. You can see some of the videos of students and their impressions here. For me, it was a passion project that allowed be to facilitate an awakening and connecting across cultures- having worked at Ashoka and already launched my own venture previous to my moving to Japan, I wanted my students to understand that they can be the creators of their own destiny- they can turn challenges into opportunities and make impact. The end game was to understand what it would take to run and manage their own projects- should they choose to convert lessons learned in the classroom into their real world careers.