PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — Thirteen Brown students were selected to attend this year’s Clinton Global Initiative University, which took place April 5-7, 2013 in St. Louis, Missouri. The annual meeting brings together students, national youth organizations, topic experts, and celebrities discuss solutions to pressing global issues. Each student who attends must make a Commitment to Action, an initiative to improve a specific community in the world. Below are the projects and organizations that the Brown students will be working on as their Commitments to Action:

• Florian Schalliol ’13.5: CSR-India Initiative works with for-profit companies in India to start, expand, or hone their corporate social responsibility programs.
• Andrew Ikhyun Kim ’13: Students for Students: South Sudan (SFS) is a student-led social venture to support the medical education of the newest nation’s first physicians. The students involved hail from both the United States and South Sudan and believe that the first generation of doctors in South Sudan deserves to succeed and support their country in spite of the challenges they face, including homelessness, food insecurity, and lack of medical education materials.
• Urmila Chadayamurri ’13: Kalagramam is an art tourism-based development initiative in Kerala, India, that seeks to build exhibition and performance spaces in some of the remotest, yet culturally richest parts of the state and make these available to adventurous tourists. These spaces are meant to help facilitate the formation of personal relationships between tourists and traditionally underpaid artisan families that could result in more opportunities for those families.
• Tomas Riegos-Quinonez ’15: iTeachCommunity connects university volunteers with students in rural Cambodia via weekly one-on-one English lessons on Skype. This free service allows Cambodian students in underfunded education systems to augment their language learning with regular access to fluent English speakers, allowing them to expand their vocational and educational opportunities. iTeachCommunity also allows university volunteers to engage in the global issue of unjust access to education from within the confines of their campus.
• Lauren Behgam ’15: The Food Recovery Network is a national nonprofit that unites and supports university students across the country to start food rescue programs on their campuses. Students rescue safe, edible food that would have otherwise been thrown away and transport it to those in need. Started in January 2012, Food Recovery Network is present on 20 campuses across the country and collectively has recovered over 130,000 pounds of food.
• Amelia Friedman ’14: The Student Language Exchange introduces students to languages and cultures that they do not have formal access to through their university curricula, thereby providing on-campus representation to historically underrepresented cultures. This exploratory learning community facilitates a culture exchange in which fluent speakers of languages that are not offered by their university share their language and celebrate their heritage via semester-long programs. This semester the organization is running programs in Bulgarian, Cantonese, Hawaiian, and Thai at Brown.
• Samuel Gilman ’15: Common Sense Action brings bipartisan youth voices to the policymaking table and advocates for a sustainable American future by creating an Agenda for Generational Equity (AGE), and building a political engine to support Democratic and Republican candidates in their respective primaries who will advocate for generational equity. Common Sense Action placed second in the national “Up to Us” competition, a first-of-its-kind, six-week challenge to engage young people on college campuses across the country on the federal government’s long-term debt. Winners were announced at CGI-U.
• Sidney Kushner ’13: CCChampions is a nonprofit organization that inspires kids to beat cancer and feel like champions through innovative friendships with pro athletes. So far, the organization has inspired over 300 boys and girls who have cancer throughout New England, been featured in the Harvard Business Review, and been honored at center court by the Boston Celtics. Kushner will launch CCChampions national headquarters as the full-time CEO when he graduates in May.
• Mabel Fung ’15: Strait Talk is a Brown student organization that facilitates dialogue between young Chinese, Taiwanese, and American professionals to come up with practical solutions to maintain a peaceful Taiwan-Strait future. The group is working to promote this methodology to other groups on and off campus to facilitate constructive dialogue between other conflict groups.
• Cliff Weitzman ’16: IvyMe aims to match Ivy League students with high school students as college counselors. For every 10 hours IvyMentores work for pay they volunteer one hour to counsel underprivileged youth at no charge.
• Drew Heckman ’13: The Queer Nebraska Youth Networks (QNYN) is a youth-focused, peer-led group providing social activities, confidential online discussion, and connections to resources to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer youth in Nebraska. The organization seeks to create statewide access points to the QNYN through a member-driven outreach strategy that uses social media and other digital tools.
• Viveka Hulyalkar ’15: HeSheWe is an online forum that takes a collaborative approach to increasing the accessibility of gender equality to young people. It relies on a gender-balanced network of university representatives to create a space for a more positive, inclusive conversation on gender equality, uniquely emphasizing unity rather than decrying division between genders. The long-term goal of the forum is to achieve international impact with university representatives performing outreach to campuses around the globe, fortifying the image of unification and providing an infrastructure to bolster gender equality movements in parts of the world that usually remain isolated from such forms of support.
• Natasha Blackadar ’15: Mighty City Ambassador Program (MCAP) is a sport-for-development project in rural South Africa. MCAP is a collaboration between Brown students and the town of Geluksburg, KwaZulu-Natal, to leverage pre-existing sports programs for sustainable education and community development.