2018 Keynote Speaker (Global Engagement Summit)

What is GES?

The Global Engagement Summit (GES), is a student-run social innovation conference hosted every April at Northwestern. GES gathers young student changemakers from around the world to develop and implement effective social ventures. What started as a project by two Northwestern undergraduates in 2005 has grown into an international community of over 500 delegates and 60 staff members spanning more than 45 countries. Delegates arrive with projects aiming to tackle the world’s biggest issues, ranging from education to healthcare to environmental sustainability. The Summit offers a wide variety of capacity-building programs, including hands-on workshops and individualized mentoring sessions. Delegates leave inspired by their newly acquired tangible skills and equipped with strategies to improve their projects and most effectively create change.

Our Event

The 2018 Global Engagement Summit will be bigger and better than ever. Our focus for this event, beyond continuing our mission to inspire and assist student change leaders, is to engage the Northwestern community. In directing our efforts locally, we hope to spread the inspiration, support, and community created at the summit with our fellow Wildcats. In April 2018, the summit will host a social change leader on campus to recount their story and shed light on a relevant social issue. Last year after our previous Catalyzer campaign, GES was able to bring DeRay McKesson, an American civil rights activist, to our summit. The speaker event was open to the Northwestern community, not just summit participants. Following the overwhelmingly positive response we received at this event, we worked with the Political Science department and the Contemporary Thought Speaker Series (CTSS) to bring Samantha Power, former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, to campus this fall.

Given our recent successes, we are confident that we can capitalize on this momentum and continue our tradition of hosting leaders in the fields of international development, social justice, and social entrepreneurship. By providing an event in the spring where students can interact with the delegates and share in this experience alongside them, we hope we can facilitate the sharing of experiences and ideas between the delegates and our Northwestern peers. By participating in socially relevant conversations, we look to inspire Northwestern students to think critically about the social change they can drive.

Our Goal

In order to improve our reach on campus, we want to host a speaker who is a well-known leader in one of the aforementioned fields. We understand that such a figure will require covering not only transportation and accommodations, but also a speaking fee. Our goal is to raise $5,000 to cover these expenses.

With your help, we will continue to create a community of social impact leaders at Northwestern and around the world.