Susan Atwood, Instructor, University of Minnesota’s Leadership : Leadership for Global Citizenship.

The point that Nicole makes about students being overwhelmed really resonated with me. It comes up every semester, multiple times. The more the students learn about global issues the more some of them feel as if there is nothing that they as one individual can accomplish. Also, why look overseas when there are issues in your own local community? So I have used a book by Doug McGill, "Here: A global citizen's journey" to discuss the term he uses, glocal and his premise that you never have to leave Rochester, MN to experience global issues as the Mayo clinic and other hi-tech industries attract people from around the globe. And those people bring something of their own culture and community with them, for good or bad. A couple of recent killings of Somali youth in the vicinity of the U of M bear witness to that as it appears likely that issues from their homeland led to these killings.

I used to start my semester by talking to the students about global issues - issues out there- and trying to bring them back here. I now start here, in Rochester and the Twin Cities for example and increase their comfort level with the concept of glocal/glboal - "problems without passports" . In oher words, every human being, regardless of nationality, has the same aspirations in terms of education, housing, infrastructure, security. The scale and impact of these issues varies from country to country but there ARE universal aspirations, we are fundamentally more alike than different.

So, moving from glocal outwards provides the students with a certain comfort level - they are dealing with global issues in their every day lives. In areas such as environment, health. security we are increasingly linked, for better or worse. The current financial crisis illustrates this all to well. Interconnectedness has benefits but also downsides - we are now so interconnected that national goverments can no longer impact this type of crisis, but we lack the global institutional capacity to tackle these issues.

As students increase their comfort level with the fact that they DO know about and understand global issues, because they experience them every day, they gain confidence that they may be able to impact them. In the same way as New Tactics emphasizes that tactics are transferable from one country or culture to another, students start to understand that their education and experiences are of value in other countries. The fact that they have carried out public achievement projects with high school students in MN means they have the framework to envisage similar projects outside their immediate environment. Then NT offers them the tactical map - map out the scale of the problem but do so not in order to get overwhelmed but to find your OWN particular way in to a problem and identify partners who are working on the same problem from a different angle. Interconnectedness in this case is a positive. And then they say, oh! this is similar to something we did in public achievement - power mapping - and we are off and running.

Most of my students will work in the domestic arena, not the international one. But the problems they will work on are still glocal/global and being active in their own communities links them to other global citizens around the world who are working on similar issues and would like to share experiences and tactics, often through issue based international not for profits. We used to call the course "Global Leadership" only to have students shy away, thinking they would have to have aspirations to become Secretary General of the UN to take the course. Now we call it Leadership for Global Citizenship which is an inclusive, not exclusive concept.

Still, none of this is to say that there is not a real challenge in avoiding the overwhelmed syndrome and it takes constant attention and guidanceand seeking new and innovative ways to help students. The founder of Give Us Wings, a not for profit organization based in the Twin Cities and working with women in rural areas in Uganda and Kenya has a good, bracing response to this issue when she addresses my class - she says feeling overwhelmed is a western privelege - the women she works with are way too busy trying to survive day to day to feel overwhelmed, they just get up each morning and work until they drop. There is apparently no word in their local language for "future" because every day is such a struggle that the future is simply not a concept worth naming. So we have no right to be overwhelmed - I realise this approach does not work for everyone! but it bears thinking about in addition to gentler ways of approaching the overwhelmed syndrome!