The New Global Citizen

Today’s world demands individuals and organizations prepared to thrive in a globally interconnected network of challenges and opportunities. Greater social awareness and innovative approaches have allowed a growing number of individuals and organizations to cross borders and cultural boundaries to create shared value and understanding.

The New Global Citizen chronicles the stories, strategies, and impact of innovative leadership and international engagement around the world. This digital publication seeks to capture the ground-level impact of these approaches, providing an avenue through which beneficiaries and implementers alike can showcase their impact.

Today’s transformed and increasingly interconnected world has spurred a revolution in our global culture, reinforcing collaborative approaches to addressing complex challenges. In so doing, the New Global Citizen elevates the ways in which individuals, corporations, and others are championing a better future for our world.

This is the world of the new global citizen. This is your world.

Content from this campaign

Innovation & Technology

Experiential Learning Offers Leaders a Pathway to Shared Value
“Rather than marketing solutions to build the coolest and newest applications, we need to help the telecommunications providers build and manage reliable networks.” In 2013, Matt Berry spent three weeks in Nigeria as part of IBM’s Smarter Cities Challenge. For Berry, who was Director of Marketing for IBM Mobile First at the time, he experienced a number of light bulb moments over the course of his assignment. “The company that can guarantee 24/7 coverage,” said Berry, “will blow away the competition.” This critical insight was sparked when he witnessed someone pull four mobile phones from their bag to make a call. All Nigerian network providers, they explained, were unreliable. When one provider went down, they would pick up the next phone.

Education

Ghana is Only the Beginning of New IBM and Peace Corps Collaboration
“I achieved so much because most of the people who came to speak to us were ladies and that also means that ladies can also do something,” said a high school student from the eastern region of Ghana about a recent project with the Peace Corps and IBM.

Ghana has long been a launch pad for groundbreaking international collaboration. In 1961, President John F. Kennedy sent the very first group of Peace Corps volunteers to Ghana. Eight years ago, the inaugural IBM Corporate Service Corps team, which brings IBM consultants, services, and talent to the world pro bono, also traveled to Ghana. For both organizations, it seemed logical to launch the first IBM Corporate Service Corps partnership project with the Peace Corps in Ghana.

Events, Media & Communications

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation Helps Companies Reimagine the Future of Business
Business needs another industrial revolution—one led by corporations like Phillips, selling light as well as bulbs, or Dell, creating a closed-loop recycled plastics supply chain to recycle computers back into new computers, or the Dow Chemical Company, recovering non-recycled plastics, and converting them into usable energy. While reducing waste is not a new idea, these companies understand the value of a circular economy at work, one in which resources are endlessly cycled back into supply chains, where waste simply does not exist.

Responsible Business & Employee Engagement

It’s Time Responsible Business Became Business as Usual
I recently had the opportunity to speak with a group of graduate students about Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and my own career in social impact. The discussion was stimulating and the students asked probing questions. After the session, a young woman approached me and said that she would love to have a job like mine and change the world, to give away a company’s money to support worthy causes. My heart sank. In my experience, CSR can be a powerful force to transform corporate culture and align business activities with social benefit. While pure philanthropy remains an important component of CSR, the field has evolved beyond giving.

Responsible Business & Employee Engagement

Mind the Gap: Companies Partner to Build Skilled Labor
In India, where over 12 million young people join the labor force every year, an even more acute skills gap has far reaching socio-economic implications; just two percent of the nearly 500 million-person workforce can be classified as skilled. Although India has world-renowned educational institutions, such as the Indian Institute of Technology, the vast majority of students are ill-prepared for the demands of the modern labor market due to outdated curriculum and a lack of qualified instructors. A 2012 study by the Indian Chamber of Commerce and Industry and EY noted that to meet vocational training needs, the country will require 70,000 additional instructors. Currently qualified instructors are entering the market at a rate of only 1,600 per year.

Philanthropy & Cause Initiatives

Global Pro Bono Converts Insight to Innovation
Over the last ten years, leading companies have begun investing their greatest asset—their human capital—in “giving back” by improving lives around the world through global pro bono programs. Such programs place employees in short-term volunteer assignments within local social-sector organizations for a period of three weeks to three months in emerging or growth markets, from India to Brazil. While the pursuit of philanthropic community impact will likely continue to underpin such initiatives, some corporations are realizing that deploying employees as pro bono consultants can have two other significant and desirable effects as well.

Innovation & Technology

Can Better Toilets and Latrines Solve the World’s Sanitation Problem?
Far too often, development professionals sanitize the discussion of toilets and excrement, using industry jargon—like “sanitation”—to euphemize a messy topic.

Health & Healthcare

Could Cervical Cancer Be the Next Polio?
According to the World Health Organization, cancer of the cervix is the second-most common cancer among women worldwide. Nearly 500,000 women are diagnosed and over 250,000 die from the disease every year because they lack access to timely screening and prevention services. In Peru, cervical cancer is the most common cause of cancer-related deaths among women.

Environment

Dow Discovers the Value of a Swamp
What if that swamp could naturally convert waste water from a nearby manufacturing site at a cost far cheaper than building and maintaining a water treatment plant? Suddenly, the interests of the accountant, the environmentalist, the politician, and the corporate engineer coalesce around the same goal: protecting the wetland.

Social Impact & Volunteering

Corporate Investment and Volunteering Help Fuel Detroit’s Renaissance
In the three part series titled “Corporate Investment and Volunteering Help Fuel Detroit’s Renaissance”, The New Global Citizen takes an in-depth look at Detroit’s current conditions and what some corporations are doing to support the city’s revival.
PYXERA Global

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