Guest post contributed by Bethany Higa (’18)
ISLAND PACIFIC ACADEMY (IPA) has many clubs. The Global Issues Network (GIN) is one club aiming to make a difference in the IPA community. Their mission is to make IPA a more sustainable community, exposing students to healthier, cleaner ways of living, and to innovative technologies that will help better their lives.
Every year, GIN puts on a Global Issues Day (GID) for one day a year during the spring semester. However, GIN is more than just a club the IPA community hears from for four hours on a weekday morning. GIN’s members participate in many other activities and projects that students don’t usually hear about that benefits the students and faculty.
GIN is a small exclusive club made up of three members of the class of 2019: Connor Carson, Haley Nakamura, and Anne Uesugi. They are supported by club advisor Sabine Yamamura.
“I joined GIN because my main goal in life is to help create a difference and progress towards a better world, with real consequences,” said Uesugi.
During Carson, Nakamura and Uesugi’s freshman year of 2015 the faculty of IPA wanted to compile three or four students together to be a part of GIN. Gerald Teramae, Head of School, is friends with the founder of GIN in Hawaiʻi, Robert Landow. Landow wanted to get schools together to work on making Hawaiʻi a better, more globally active state.
Carson, Nakamura and Uesugi applied to be part of GIN and became an official club in 2015. They have been putting on GID since 2017.
“Every year, our mission is to raise awareness [on] different issues facing those in our local and global communities, and giv[ing] the students a sense of motivation and purpose towards solving these problems,” said Nakamura. “This is an opportunity for students to connect their lives to a larger, common goal and hopefully inspire them in their future careers and decisions to do good for the world and understand what they will face.”
This year’s issues are water conservation, healthy living, and sustainable energy. GIN’s goal for students was to learn about choosing sustainable alternatives that will better benefit the larger community such as using LED light bulbs over incandescent bulbs. They wanted students to understand sustainability issues they may face in the future and how they could help lessen their greenhouse impact.
“The actual mental impact cannot necessarily be measured through actions for a few years, but we hope that as the message is continually instilled, students will continue to develop a deep appreciation for global issues. Since there were a few different messages that were spread throughout the day…I think each student was affected differently by each one, but hopefully they were all struck by something on that day,” said Nakamura.
Aside from GID, Carson, Nakamura, and Uesugi take on other projects throughout the year to help IPA.
One project is selling coffee to the teachers and faculty. GIN uses locally grown coffee from Green World Coffee Farms in Waialua, Hawaiʻi to both support the local agriculture and promote local businesses.
“The money from this project has two main purposes: supplies and food for Global Issues Day…and funding the expensive future aquaponics farm, which will require funds for its creation and maintenance,” said Nakamura.
The aquaponics system is the biggest project GIN wishes to complete for IPA. They don’t have the money to fund and build it yet, but they hope to complete it in the near future.
“We are planning to do an aquaponics system to teach students about agricultural developments and hopefully do good things with the produce created,” said Uesugi.
Soon the members of GIN at IPA will be graduating. As of right now, they have a partial plan in place to have GIN continue on. One idea is to have kids in the freshman class shadow the members of GIN to see how the club is run. The goal is to have them learn the ropes and take over the following year after Carson, Nakamura and Uesugi graduate.
“There’s a million things we always have to do and sometimes it feels like there’s one more thing, but it’s a good movement. The idea is real behind it [ ] that all schools and students [are] very powerful together,” said Yamamura. “I think they will be very sad if [GIN] dies.”
Yamamura is not the only person deeply impacted by GIN’s hard work over the years. Each member of GIN is making a difference in their community and in their own lives.
“GIN has inspired me to do as much good as I can in the world. GIN is a very empowering club and has made me realize that even as a student, I can make a difference – that I don’t need to be a certain age or in a certain position to achieve my goals, or to help our world. Changing the world only takes an idea, determination, and hard work. I feel that I can finally take control of my educational experience, and be a real part of our global community,” said Nakamura.