I wanted to recognize Juhee, Jun, Tommy, Jenny, and Julie who attended the Global Issues Network Conference in Manila this past weekend. At this 3-day conference these students joined more than 500 high school students from across East Asia to exchange ideas and solutions to 15 of the world’s most pressing global issues.

Last October these students volunteered to represent Brent Baguio at the East Asian Global Issues Network Conference. For months they met regularly to educate themselves on numerous pressing global Issues from Extreme Poverty to the Digital Divide, to Deforestation and Fisheries Depletion. They worked together to come up with a small-scale solution to one of these global issues and they got to work implementing that solution. What is impressive about these students is that they went beyond the first step of merely talking about the problems faced by the world today—they took the next step by addressing these problems in our community through their own service project. At the conference, they attended workshops where they were able to learn about the problems that other schools are working on as well as present their project idea to students from many other countries.

Next next Friday (March 9) many of you will get the chance to learn more about what the conference was like and about the project that they have been working on. I hope that if you have a similar desire to be a positive change for the world you join them this year or at the very least support them in making an impact on these world problems in our community.