Get Engaged 2023: Ten Years of Building Agency and Expanding Reach
Student and staff participants at Get Engaged 2023 gather for a group portrait at Central European University in Budapest, Hungary. Photo by Peter Egyed.
Running from June 27-July 4, the event was the largest and most diverse convening in the conference’s decade-long history, giving students a truly global platform to discuss the implementation of their civic engagement projects and providing them with valuable feedback from peers and staff advisors.
This year’s event reflected OSUN’s expanding reach, with students from a wide range of countries and backgrounds participating. OSUN institutions based in Africa, Asia, North and South America, and Europe were represented, as were other partnering global associations, such as the Talloires Network and the Global Student Forum.
Erin Cannan, Director of the Civic Engagement Initiative and Vice President for Civic Engagement at Bard College, said "Get Engaged celebrated its 10th year this summer. We now have close to 500 alums from well over 30 countries. Each participant has demonstrated a bias to action within their communities and never was there a more important time to build out that sense of agency to act in the world, to address everything from poverty to gender inequality to climate change."
Due to the large number of attendees, organizers used a new format for student presentations, allowing students to present in smaller groups focused on specific themes, including Climate Action and Sustainability, Disability Justice, Education, Gender Equity, Inclusion, Mental Health, and Youth Engagement. This change provided an opportunity for students to present to their peers in a more intimate context, allowing for deeper discussions of the issues their projects tackled.
Students also engaged in professional development workshops focused on media literacy, community organizing, visual storytelling, public speaking, and more. In addition, they spent a day making site visits throughout Budapest to work with community-based groups on projects related to sustainable farming, discrimination, and grassroots arts supporting marginalized groups.
Wai Moe, a Parami University student who presented on the Media Club he founded at his institution, said the conference gave him a useful opportunity to network with civic-minded peers who motivated him to build on his current efforts. “The conference has inspired me to further develop and expand my Media Club project, particularly in media literacy and civic engagement. I want to share my experience with my university so we can organize a workshop to raise awareness of media literacy," he said. The Media Club has held multiple workshops to educate youth on media literacy and misinformation and provides future digital creators with responsible content creation skills.
The The Zuu Zin, whose Social Issues Club at Parami University explores solutions for local challenges such as child labor, gender equity, and labor rights, said "The most important thing I learned from the conference would be active listening. …Without active listening and empathy, there won't be any collective action to tackle social issues that affect most of the population or even our minorities in our communities," she said.
Sadaf Osmani, a student from Afghanistan at the American University of Beirut, said the conference gave her several opportunities to observe how sustainable networks could be created, both virtually and in person, with time and dedication.
Osmani gave the example of “The Fact Web,” a game students played where each mentioned a fact about themselves while holding on to a strand from a ball of thread that they then passed on to one another. This act of physical and verbal sharing eventually created a web that became too difficult to disentangle. “That’s globalization. That’s how networking works,” she said.
“When we make a network, although time passes, it quite gets connected and however we try, we cannot untangle it. The network becomes permanent,” she said. “Imagine there are 60+ people here and one of them spreads my word in their communities; I can imagine how big this will get.”
Post Date: 07-17-2023