Global PACT: Trainings Program Outline

Trainings Summary | Course Outline | Brazil | Cambodia | Croatia | South Africa | Thailand

What you will do

• Organize projects that will create meaningful social change by working with a small and multi-national group and by connecting with the resources of the local community.
• Identify opportunities to create meaningful social change by incorporating previous knowledge with issue research and creative thinking
• Execute a successful social change project and leave a positive mark on the local community.
• Learn about the history of your location by interviewing local people and listening to their stories
• Develop confidence and improve written and spoken communication skills.
• Continue to respect and appreciate the culture, traditions, history and customs of both local community and international participants.
• Return to our home communities having made new cross-cultural connections - friendships, discovered new knowledge and as advocates for responsible activism and change.

This process, outlined in the Global PACT manual, mimics the practices successful social entrepreneurs and activists throughout history, like Martin Luther King and Cesar Chavez

How You Will Do It

Global PACT's teaching style is interactive.  You will learn both inside and outside the classroom, - learning by doing.  It is summarized well in the phrase: 

"Tell me, and I will forget.  Show me, and I may remember.  Involve me, and I will understand." 

- Author Unknown.

During a typical day, you will be heavily involved in learning how to create a project.  Even if you've been successful before, this process will be an unique opportunity to learn how to work across diverse cultures to collaborate and achieve goals together.  During the day you will receive six hours of classroom instruction, three in the morning and three in the afternoon. The entire program is conducted in English, but it is also conducted in translation for participants who do not speak English.

Your Team

From your first moment in Global PACT you will be assigned to a multi-national team made up of students from across our host community and from across the world.  Each of you will have different cultures, habits, and languages, but working within your group will not only help you to make connections across cultures, but you will learn where you agree, where you disagree, and most importantly how to collaborate across cultures to address the issues you all care about.  In your group, together, you will choose an important local issue which your team will address during the training.  

Interactive Exercises

From beginning to end, our experienced professors and trainers will lead your group in highly interactive exercises from the Global PACT Curriculum.  This rigorous and globally focused cross-cultural curriculum has been developed by many experienced and dedicated activists, entrepreneurs, professors and students across every culture and continent we've worked with.  Each exercise focuses on a process-oriented skill, which you’ll apply in your groups to your own project.  These are the same vital skills you will need to start a project in any organization, company or group. Step by step each exercise will help you to develop your project.

Group Work

After each lesson, you will work through the exercise in the Global PACT Manual.  In your teams you will work across-cultures to incorporate your group's interests, needs, goals to the lesson.  

This will be one of the most powerful and difficult parts of the training, learning to work across cultures to achieve your goals together.  

However, it's also one of the best as you'll get a unique opportunity to meet and make friendships with people from backgrounds you'd never otherwise be able to make a connection with.

Action Research

Creating real change is an active process. Action research is about engaging local people, discovering their issues, thinking collaboratively about solutions and creating new knowledge. You have to figure out exactly what you need to know and where you might find it. Action research exercises prepare you to understand new, developing, and unresolved issues. It requires inventiveness and effort. 

Most people assume that someone else already has the answer and all you need to do is "look it up. That approach might work fine for a paper, but if the answer to your issue were on the Internet, do you really think someone else wouldn’t have found it already?  

Expert Speakers & Site Visits

Whether it is the executive director of Helsinki Watch, a member of Parliament, an investigative reporter, a leading environmentalist or the World Health Organization malaria eradication project director, Global PACT brings the key public policy players to the classroom. We will also make trips to observe individuals and organizations in action. You learn best when interacting in intimate settings with the men and women who make the news. Whether you're visiting organizations that alleviate poverty in South Africa or that conduct post-war reconciliation in Croatia, your first-hand experiences with major players is key to understanding how social change happens. Please see individual program pages for information on specific speakers and excursions.

Press Conference

At the end of every Global PACT training, all groups participate in a professional press conference, explaining their discoveries to peers and the general public. 

Frequently, Global PACT students from each training can find pictures and stories about themselves in newspapers the very next day.

After Class and Weekends: Excursions

After class, you will be free to hang out and explore your host community with classmates, though you will also have to do some project work with your team. 

On Saturdays, trainers lead group excursions to historically and culturally important sites in the area. On Sundays, students have a free day to organize their own expeditions, develop their projects, explore the host city, or rest!