Abby Falik is the founder and CEO of Global Citizen Year, a nonprofit that operates a gap-year program for new high school graduates who aspire to become global leaders. Over the last decade, Global Citizen Year has sent hundreds of fellows to countries including Brazil, India, and Senegal.
We did an emergency evacuation (of our fellows) in April, just before airports were closing. The writing was on the wall. It was most likely that we wouldn’t be able to run our fellowship the next school year, and that there were going to be a record number of kids that couldn’t go to college as planned. So we launched the Global Citizen Academy for high school graduates worldwide. (Students) take a course on leadership; they have access to mentors and coaches, access to a speaker series. In a way, this is what we’ve been planning for. How can we normalize new pathways and take advantage of this moment, when everyone is questioning the time and cost of a bundled higher education?
