Rushing to the UN headquarters on a slightly hot and humid Wednesday morning of 22nd July 2015, my mind was trying to anticipate the upcoming Nexus global youth summit for which Atlas Corps fellows are selected as volunteers. It was a one of its kind opportunity to be a part of this summit that attract leading philanthropist in the US to share their ideas and work to the wider audience. At the same time, I was thinking that this world has many issues including poverty, hunger, famine, gender violence and discrimination and the list can go on. How a three day summit will make any difference.
Stuck with these thought I entered the grand premises of UN Headquarters, after disposing all the metallic objects in the provided tray including my belt, I passed the security clearance and met the Atlas Corps fellows’ crew standing in a group. I joined with a great sense of belonging and proximity. After listening to the general instructions and our roles and responsibilities, we went to the joint session and appreciated the opening speech by key note speakers of UN and other important global change makers.
The participants left for the breakout sessions and I was free till the afternoon. I decided to take this opportunity to attend some of the sessions that are proceeding. I got an opportunity to attend the session of two human activist. I entered the room and started enjoying the spectacular view of the East River from the window suddenly the topic of discussion shifted me to it. I diverted my attention to the speaker, she was specifically shedding light on the discrimination of people based on cast and race. This got my attention in an instant. She stressed that even in this age and time, people are discriminated on their cast in the world based on misconceived religious dogmas (I prefer not to state country names). She was extremely passionate about her work and talked about her efforts to draw attraction to this cause. I was completely absorbed in this conversation and the session ended. I left the room with a sense of harsh reality that has blown me away but also a great a sense of hope that these type of issues are been highlighted.
I went to my session, which was an in person conversation with founder of Pencil of Promise Global Education Plat Form, Adam Braun moderated by Jessicae Abo. I introduced myself as a fellow and a room ambassador, the speaker Adam Braun and the moderator Jessica Abo and than Jessica took the lead of the session. The conversation started with the early life intro of the guest and gradually shifted to his work with local communities of Ghana, Guatemala and Laos. He specifically talked about measuring the impact of his organization interventions. Since 2009 his organization has served 304 school and 33,249 students.
The summit proceeded with other joint and breakout sessions and I completed all my responsibilities throughout the Nexus event. I also found an answer to the question which was disturbing me in the start. Although I enjoyed being a part of this conference, including a party on the yacht and various networking opportunities. All the people including the CEOs, NGO employees and myself, we are all contributing in our sphere of life to influence the world in a better way. We cannot change the world in a week but summits similar to Nexus can amplify the voices of many, who are trying to do it.