Global Kids: In Partnership With Adelphi

When Adelphi University collaborated with Global Kids at “Building a Culture of Peace,” a February 7, 2015, event on the Manhattan Center campus, it continued a partnership with the nonprofit organization that has lasted some 15 years.

Carole Artigiani, a former Sarah Lawrence College professor of history and women’s studies and the wife of Adelphi President Robert A. Scott, founded Global Kids in 1989.

“First, I interviewed students in New York City public schools and asked them, ‘What do you want to learn, and how do you want to learn it?’” Artigiani said. “I was told, ‘We don’t know what’s going on in the world.’ That became the mission. If young people have the opportunity to learn about things they care about, they’ll respond with energy, imagination and a desire to learn more.”

Thousands of students have been thinking globally and acting locally at Global Kids schools ever since. Global Kids, which has offices in Manhattan and Washington, D.C., has trained young people for positions of leadership on local, national and international issues. The group partners with schools to enable students to examine global issues such as poverty, discrimination, immigration, children’s rights, human rights and sustainability and connect them to what is happening in their own communities.

Monthly roundtables at the Council on Foreign Relations allow students to speak with foreign policy experts. Students took part in the People’s Climate March last September, and they continue to speak out at demonstrations around police misconduct. In a poignant coincidence, the son of Eric Garner—an African-American killed by police using an apparent illegal chokehold in July 2014—is in the Global Kids program at Curtis High School in Staten Island, New York, said Kevin Murungi, Global Kids’ director of human rights and foreign policy programs.

As long as young people are interested in acquiring leadership skills that can be brought to international issues and civic engagement, Adelphi’s partnership with Global Kids figures to remain strong.

“There have been Adelphi students serving as interns at Global Kids, and Global Kids students come to Adelphi to study as Levermore Global Scholars,” said Devin Thornburg, Ph.D., a professor in the Ruth S. Ammon School of Education. “We share a vision of how peace can best be built through our youth at local and global levels.”