Keerat Pannu (SFS ’10) is trying to change the world. Through her involvement in the One World Youth Project, a non-profit organization created by fellow Georgetown student Jessica Rimington (SFS ‘09), Pannu oversees a partnership between a two schools — one in Boston and one in Mongolia. This week The Guide, takes a look at helping kids through the power of global education.

Describe your work with One World Youth Project.
I work with One World Youth Project, which is a non-profit organization started by Jessica Rimington. She took a year off after high school, and during that year, she came up with the idea to start this organization. It’s a program for middle school-aged kids and high school kids throughout the world, and it links schools in the U.S. and Canada with schools abroad. We call them learning partnerships, and each pair not only learns about their partner school but also are given Millenium Development Goals. By the end of the year, they have to develop a community project that helps to improve upon the millennium goal they were given.

What are the Millenium Development Goals?
They are goals that the [United Nations] set up that all countries have to work towards by 2018. I can’t remember all of them, but some are like improving maternal health, preventing HIV/AIDS and malaria, and there are bunch more.

Are there many Georgetown students involved in the program?
This isn’t a program run through Georgetown; it’s run by a team of like 20 international youth, and they are each called a project ambassador. They are basically in charge of making sure that the pairs are talking to each other. My sister schools are a school in Cameroon and a school in Boston.

How do the students work towards achieving the Millennium Development Goals?
We start off by giving them a curriculum that they can work into their own curriculum, so every month they have to do certain activities — like the first month they had to start out by looking at their own culture.

How do schools become involved in the Youth Program?
It’s completely free, and it started off in Massachusetts, where Jessica lives, so there are a bunch there. We have schools in 19 U.S. states and, I think, 46 countries. They either find out through the Web or through the conferences that [Rimington] or the other project ambassadors go to.

How did you hear about the organization?
I believe in the power of education to change a child’s life, so opportunities to participate in a program like this is an opportunity they normally wouldn’t have.
One of the cool stories I like … really shows the power of cultural change can have. One of the schools that was involved in the program was a school in New Orleans, with their sister school in Mongolia. After Hurricane Katrina, we weren’t sure what had happened to the school, and we were very concerned. A week later, we heard from the school in Mongolia, and they were concerned because they hadn’t heard from their friends, and they wanted to know what had happened to them. The school in Mongolia held a benefit concert and raised $1000, which in Mongolia is a really big deal. And the school ended up being like five feet under water, so that money really did help.
That’s why this program is so great — you realize that we pretty much are the same and that we are all human. There’s a great quote that I love that Jessica always says: “Passion leads to action.”

Are any Georgetown students involved?
There are three of us — Rimington, me, and Jill Slutzker (SFS ’09). We hold regional summits every year, and the past two years we have had our North American summits here, so all of the kids in the American schools come here and either stay for the weekend or four days and do youth empowerment programs.

Which development goal are your sister schools working towards?
Combating AIDS and malaria; what they are doing right now is brainstorming for the month of January so we haven’t actually come up. Other schools have held awareness days in their communities.

What’s your involvement on a day to day basis?
Every week I send e-mails to my schools that they might find interesting. I also post articles to our shared website for them to respond to. One of them was about racial divisions. So I asked them to explain racial divisions in their own countries to help the other country understand, and it was really interesting. Then there’s monthly meetings online — it’s important to keep in touch with each other as an international organization so we know what’s going on. It’s hard to coordinate times with people around the world, so they’re at 7 a.m. Sunday mornings, which is like nine at night in Indonesia. 7 a.m. on a Sunday morning is hard to get up for, but it’s worth it because it’s always so cool and everyone’s really optimistic about we’re capable of.

What has been your favorite experience with OWYP?
Some of the team leaders took a video of all the sister schools and it’s pretty great. Sometimes in college it’s easy to get disillusioned and so to see the faces of kids around the world with so much that they can accomplish something big is inspiring. I mean, to be us is hard sometimes because you have to, like, write 50 e-mails in a row, but then you see we can make a change, we are making a change in the lives of these youth.

What are you hoping the youth gain from this experience?
I’m hoping they gain the confidence and the knowledge they can change something, too, whether its big or small. They can change their school, their community, they can change someone’s life on the other side of the world.