By: Mericel Mirabal & Lucy Zhou
As mentioned in a previous post, we had the delight of working with a team of global villagers who would be residing in Lehigh for about five weeks. With their entire network of villagers and alumni villagers, they represented over 150 countries. We had asked them to collect some information for us on a global scale through surveys and interviews and to present it to us in the form of a report. Since we did not have the chance to collect data on much bigger businesses or global entrepreneurs, we thought this was the perfect opportunity to formulate our research and findings in a more tangible way.
Our Global Village team really impressed us with their delivery. They put together a report of their data for us and presented it in the form of a powerpoint. They spoke eloquently about the results they collected, which supported our own conclusions that those among the underrepresented population felt their businesses were inclusive, but they had also experienced discrimination based on their gender, age and race specifically. This might be because of the fact that these underrepresented people are among other people who are similar to them so they feel comfortable and accepted. The global villagers also specified where they were surprised with the data as well as where they thought we could go next. For example, their data collected that there wasn’t sufficient information on discrimination in the workplace in terms of people with different sexual orientations and disabilities, and so far, we have seen the same result in our own data so we plan on doing more research in this area. Their presentations gave us some really good ideas for what areas we should look into moving forward based on the data.
Overall, it was a wonderful experience, and we are glad that we were the team chosen as a way to test out the collaboration between a Mountaintop Summer Experience project and a Global Village team. Collaborating with them came easy because they were very open to ideas from us but also very willing to put forth their own ideas and explain them. They worked really hard to get the results we wanted, and we are very grateful for that. We hope to maintain the global connections they gave us and continue to move forward with our project to make changes and implement education about inclusivity within businesses and society.