On October 22, 2017, at the first MUN Thought Leader’s Summit in Doha, Qatar, representatives from the Model United Nations community met to discuss the importance of moving students from academic debate to impactful action, and to encourage MUN programs to embed outreach, service and support of the United Nations, particularly for the SDGs, into MUN programs and conferences.
Over the course of this amazing day, the rough outlines of an MUN movement began to take shape. But the true impetus occurred the day before, launched by a question, and answered by MUN delegates themselves.
In the final session of the QLC, Director of THIMUN Qatar, Lisa Martin, hosted a round table discussion on the question of how MUN could support the SDGs. Present at the meeting were two individuals, both unfamiliar with the Model UN program, but whose questions proved pivotal to a discussion that ignited the imagination of all in attendance. Natabara Rolloson, an independent creative consultant for the United Nations, posed the initial question. “What comes after the conference?” Sean Robinson from the Teach SDGs movement offered an outsider’s perspective to SDG engagement from a non-MUN perspective.
Later that evening an impromptu gathering was called by Natabara, who shared a much larger vision for the possible direction this MUN community might take. He sparked the imagination of those who attended, and by the start of the Thought Leaders Summit the next morning, munimpact.org had been secured, associated social media accounts set up, and many of the participants of that meeting were primed and ready for this new conversation.
The Summit agenda had initially been to develop a list of best practices for MUN conferences, but that was replaced with a conservation around impact within the MUN community. That day saw an important foundational discussion on the mission of this new community, as well as the adoption of a name that would identify it (initially coined by Aditya Soma from Worldview).
At its conclusion, chief of the Education Outreach Section at the UN Department of Public Information, Kimmberly Mann, suggested an MUN Impact event at the United Nations. In August 2018, that event, now known as the UN MUN Summit, was given the green light. MUN Impact’s vision of a community driven by action in support of the SDGs found a voice at the United Nations on April 12, 2019, and the activism of its youth applauded by the Secretary-General, António Guterres himself.
