One World Youth Project, a nonprofit organization founded by Jessica Rimington (SFS ’09) that works at a grassroots level to achieve the United Nations Millennium Development Goals, has reached Georgetown in an initiative incubated within the university’s Office of the President for one year as a new community-engagement program on campus.

According to the organization’s mission statement, OWYP partners middle and high schools worldwide in order to facilitate cultural exchange and collaborative community service. Teachers in participating schools implement a special curriculum that focuses on global awareness. Classrooms in the United States are paired with sister classrooms abroad, and throughout the year, these students keep in touch and maintain a cross-cultural dialogue. At the end of the year, the students participate in a community service event in their respective local areas.

“OWYP is a youth-driven movement that’s global,” Rimington said.

Dialogue is facilitated through project ambassadors, college-age volunteers assigned to specific classrooms who are responsible for integrating the OWYP curriculum by leading a class every one to two weeks.

While the organization was founded in 2004, this year will be the first time that college students serve in this position, as in the past, teachers received guidance from the organization’s full-time staff. According to the organization’s project goals for this year, the Georgetown University Project Ambassadors, who were chosen this past weekend, will work in Ward-7 schools.

“OWYP has chosen Georgetown as a pilot location for our new model of engaging universities; we hope that what we do here at Georgetown will expand to other universities around the nation and the world. Each university involved in OWYP will recruit students to serve as campus coordinators and project ambassadors,” Rimington said.

artine Randolph (SFS ’12) and Deven Comen (COL ’12) have been selected to serve as this year’s campus coordinators.

“The campus coordinators develop a model for Georgetown University to increase the appeal of the organization, ensure its sustainability and have the program reach university students,” Randolph said.

“OWYP really aligned with what I wanted to see in the development of a Georgetown consciousness about education, youth action and community service. It was not just something that you schedule on a Saturday once in a while, but as a way of life,” Randolph said.

The original inspiration for OWYP came from Rimington’s experience during a service trip to Johannesburg, South Africa.

“I realized that cultural exchange and 21st-century skills were just as important to be taught as math or sciences. The seat of it started there,” Rimington said.

According to Rimington, OWYP is different from many other nonprofit organizations of its kind because it focuses on solidarity rather than on charity or aid. Through looking at challenges in their own communities and using the resources that they have to resolve these problems, she believes that children and college students are building the global solidarity necessary for the realization of the Millenium Development Goals.

“[We want to] build a new generation of students more aware of their own surroundings,” Rimington said. “We want them to act on UN Millennium Development Goals at a time when they seem too young to be doing anything about it. It’s not just about looking down at what we see in the media as extreme situations of poverty and all of the different ways the media portrays it, but looking at it at an equal level, as children.” “