Global Awareness in Action at Yale

In order to describe why the Global Action presentations at Yale University are such a magical event, I’ll need to indulge in a somewhat squishy metaphor:

As a student of cognitive linguistics at Georgetown University, I remember being particularly drawn to the theory of emergent properties. With regard to the human brain, it means that while individual neurons don’t really “know” that they are a neuron, if you get enough of them together and connected in the right ways, voila! - they form a brain that is self-aware and capable of thinking deep thoughts like: “I am a brain made up of neurons”.

Being at Yale University during the Global Action presentations means getting to witness and participate in the emergence of a generation of conscious and conscientious leaders.

Students have recently returned from life-changing experiences working in an HIV/AIDS clinic in Rwanda, or with a youth-run radio station in El Salvador, or at an orphanage in Cambodia and yet the feeling is not one of something having ended, but rather of something just beginning. Every seat in Yale’s Davies auditorium is packed for each and every presentation. A participant in the China program stands up and asks about sustainability issues in Northern India; students who have spent time in South Africa and Malawi compare the health education strategies they saw in-country.

The network of knowledge and activism that emerges at Yale is something that refuses to be confined to just a few days, or some photos put in an album on the shelf. Students have gone on to design their own GAP year programs, allowing them to return and continue the work they started on Global Action; they have chartered their own international non-profit foundations; created goal-oriented fundraisers; and most importantly, they have remained connected - to their host countries and communities, to the issues they witnessed and grappled with while on Putney Global Action programs, and to each other.

As the director of the Global Action session at Yale University, I am excited and grateful for the opportunity to be a part of this great emergence – I hope you will join us!

-Patrick Noyes