MUN IMPACT
The Model United Nations community is an army of untapped foot soldiers, an enormous community of delegates who care deeply about the role of the UN in the world and the mandates it is tasked with carrying out. The MUN community is, however, a diverse one, with regional, procedural and institutional cultural identities that limits interaction between programs.
One thing many MUN programs do care about, no matter their operating procedures or conference structure, is IMPACT: promoting and working to make Model UN impactful for its participants. Impact can be personal, at the delegate level and leading to more informed, more skilled and more committed global citizens, or more outward focused, where MUN becomes a driver for community engagement and a commitment to promote and help the UN do its job. This external focus of IMPACT has many different looks, from a conference measuring food waste and getting participants to change their habits, to a group of MUN delegates who start an NGO in Afghanistan to teach Model UN, women’s empowerment and leadership. MUN programs have been impactful for a long time. MUN Impact, as a community and movement, aims to focus attention on these practices, and to act as a call to arms for all MUN programs to use their communities to put IMPACT at the center of what they do.
To this end, a group of MUN delegates, directors, and thought leaders, through meetings at the Qatar Leadership Conference, have conceptualized this new community around IMPACT. With your help, we aim to create the following:
Community: Through our presence on social media, we will rally around #MUNimpact, to share stories of the impactfulness of our programs, and to move a conversation on how impact might help unite us in support of UN mandates and goals, particularly the Sustainable Development Goals. Anyone can jump in, initiate, share or join a conversation on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or LinkedIn.
Resource Hub: Through a website ( currently in the planning stages), an MUN Impact blog and website will give us a platform to share stories, and to act as a repository for resources to be shared with others. If your MUN club ran a great service project, you can share that idea so that others might adopt it? If you were inspired to start a Peace Center, tell us how that happened? If you made a commitment that your conference would reach out to under-served students to get them involved in MUN, how did you do it? A resource hub can be a home of MUN initiatives with the hope of sharing our best practices.
UN Gateway: Even though MUN delegates and organizers think or hope they are doing the work of the UN, they often aren’t. Even with good intentions, finding resources, or staying true to what the UN is doing can be challenging. Often UN resources are hard to find, or packaged in a way that make them inaccessible to the general public. The MUN community would also like the UN to know what IT is doing, and to engage in a dialogue so that this army of delegates can mobilize to support the United Nations, particularly in advancing progress around the SDGs. In the months ahead we hope find that entry point, the place where that dialogue and exchange can take place.
Face 2 Face Impact: We need to find ways to come together around IMPACT. Setting our different procedural rules and MUN cultures aside, we need to find places, events and programs where we can work together, to talk about MUN, but most importantly, to make IMPACT. In the months ahead, we will begin to figure out this important piece of the puzzle. It will be an exciting one!
Right now we are starting where all movements need to start-at the beginning. We invite you to join us and others who are already doing great things and using Model UN to make a real difference in people’s lives. Follow us on social media, use the hashtag #MUNimpact, and sign up here if you’d like to help us in growing this movement.
