Global Village Meets Mountaintop Summer Experience

By: Mericel Mirabal

The Iacocca Global Village for Future Leaders is an intensive and immersive five-week program at Lehigh University which was created to help build leadership skills for people from all over the world. The purpose is to help you thrive by building relationships with each other, cross-cultural leadership skills, and business and entrepreneurship skills.

As a trial run this year, the Global Village will be testing how forming a partnership with a team from the Mountaintop Summer Experience will be and how it would benefit both programs. Luckily for us, we were the team chosen. After their arrival this week, we met with a team of five, soon to be six, villagers who will be coming on board as consultants to help us conduct research and expand how we share the knowledge that we gather.

At our meeting yesterday, we discussed what our project focuses on, what our goals are and the progress that we have been making to accomplish them. While Lucy and I have mainly been focusing on interviewing people in South Bethlehem or from the Lehigh Valley, we knew that we could gather results or research from a much larger pool with the help of the villagers. We decided that, for now, they would be able to use their connections from their home countries or with other villagers themselves (since they are representing over 150 countries) by way of interviewing and surveying them in order to be able to compare the data and build a report.

After we’ve conducted most of our research, we hope to be able to share it all in a way that would create more of an impact but that would also leave space for more to be done with the next team that comes on board. Right now we are very excited to be working on this project and are excited to have a team of villagers to help us out. We hope that with this project, we can help to show why building an inclusive society is so important and more awareness of how to get there.

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