Press Release-MUN YA 2017- Committee 5 Open Discussion
23 August 2017-
MUN Youth Assembley's committee on Enhancing the effectiveness of Model United Nations as a platform for Youth Development & Employability opened the discussion.
It’s very easy to perceive that over the decades Model UN has become a great way to educate the youth about the most relevant subjects in modern society. No surprise that one committee in MUN Youth Assembly 2017 was chosen to specifically address this subject.
Aiming for the success of the discussion, committee secretary Michael Coomber made it clear that the goal of the United Nations in its meetings nowadays is to pass most resolutions by consensus, fostering the search for a common cause in every topic and uniting the nations. The same principle applies to the Youth Assembly, where delegates are supposed to achieve resolutions through collaboration, which will encourage people to make the resolutions go from words to practice.
Expressing their own opinions, the delegates came up with ideas that would change the way MUN works and inspire participants to become better citizens and leaders. Uzbekistan’s Mekhriniso Khamraeva said that youth in modern days is expected to have many skills, whose development is greatly promoted by Model UN. Nevertheless, she felt “participants are too interested in prizes and winning”, but they need to find out that MUN has much more to offer, often helping in their development as people and future leaders.
One delegate followed the same logic and asked: “Why does it always come down to the awards?”. She went on to expose how MUN helps with career, but it also needs to make an impact and a difference in people’s lives, heading towards a better world for future generations, “starting from small groups to a bigger picture”.
The group discussed the impact that Model UN can have in many different ways, such as shaping personality and character, revealing skills, improving and fostering cultural diversity, creating relations between people, increasing sociability and conducting social action.
Chris-MUS Foundation’s observer delegate raised awareness to what turned out to be one of the most valued topics in the meeting: accessibility. He started to talk about the issue mentioning how it’s difficult for a blind person to take part in a conference without the proper assistance, then provoked the delegates asking about their ideas on including the blind, the deaf, the wheelchair users and, generally, people with different disabilities.
One of the conclusions was that including people with disabilities would already be a step forward, as, usually, these people help raising awareness to those causes and actually advocate so that the inclusion is even bigger. One step at a time, the goal is to have the most diversity of people as possible included in conferences around the world.
At the beginning of the second session, committee secretary Michael Coomber talked about how that was the moment to expose all the ideas that the delegates were passionate about, which can tackle the issues in discussion in the committee. “You have people from all over the world here now. What you do here can have a huge impact on solving these problems and can be implemented worldwide. This is your time”, said the secretary.
Session went on with discussions about how the MUN activities can make a difference on the development of professional skills, promoting leadership and employability. There were also debates about how to make MUN more accessible, moving from only the disability issues to other subjects like prices, plane tickets, visas, access to the local of the conference, etc. Although not every problem can be tackled directly by the delegates, as some of them depend of government or social factors, the general understanding was that Model UN have a central role on minimizing the inequality in the road to total inclusion.
