Global Student Embassy (GSE) was founded in the fall of 2008 by Lucas and Jasper Oshun. After graduating from college, the brothers wanted to combine their passion for travel and meeting people from other cultures with their commitment to grassroots social change and to empowering youth to implement change in their home communities. Together they developed a mission that seeks to forge and cultivate socially constructive relationships amongst the world’s youth through inquiry based workshops, international travel and community development projects.

GSE began by working in high school classrooms in their hometown of Sebastopol, California and in the high schools of neighboring cities. Lucas and Jasper created courses about current events, international relations and youth leadership. During the classroom discussions, students voiced concerns and observations about where they could create changes that would improve conditions in the communities where they lived and worked. Students then took action on these ideas and created projects to address them. In the years since those first forays into local stateside classrooms, GSE has grown to include high school and college classrooms from Sebastopol, to Santa Rosa, to San Francisco, to Santa Cruz and beyond.

Concurrently, GSE extended their programs to include partner communities in Peru and Argentina. A model was established wherein each community has a local director to facilitate GSE’s workshops and projects. During the years since its’ creation, GSE’s international partner communities have evolved and changed as needs and committed partnerships developed in Tanzania, Ecuador and Nicaragua. Each of these partner communities has participated in reciprocal cultural exchange visits to the US during the winter months and in hosting traveling American students in their home communities. Expanding on the exchange portion of the program, GSE has recently included spring-break trips to work with these same international peers.

In the short time since its’ founding, GSE has made enormous contributions to their communities both at home and abroad. In the US, GSE has lobbied for, raised funds for, designed and created mini-farms at numerous high schools where healthy and sustainable cultivation practices are taught and implemented. In Sebastopol, the yield from their founding garden, the Village Park Community Garden, has been donated to local food banks providing much needed healthy produce for at-risk citizens. In Peru, GSE constructed a 1.5 km canal to carry water to fields that had been previously unavailable for cultivation due to water shortages. In Argentina, the group performed much needed improvements at a local school including the installation of a mini-farm and repainting of the school. In Ecuador and in Nicaragua (GSE’s newest partner), GSE is working to collect seeds, grow ‘starts’ and plant indigenous trees in areas in great need of reforestation.

In the years it has been in operation, GSE’s work has evolved to increasingly focus on correcting environmental and sustainability problems. The need for more organic community-based agriculture and environmental restoration has brought together students from disparate communities who are in sync in answering the call for change and in developing common solutions to the challenges they face.

Global Student Embassy is a simple idea that uses the increasing interconnectedness of the world to connect small communities. The issues that students have identified in their communities are also global issues. Students who live worlds apart are on the same page concerning these very important issues despite the differences in their cultures. Through learning cultural differences, engaging in public service and sharing positive experiences, GSE aims to cultivate young global citizens who feel empowered to create positive change in their local and international communities.