It seems like we spend a great deal of time, effort and money to fix problems that already exist in our community – but every once in a while, we have the opportunity to do something that is so far-reaching, so forward thinking, that we can actually prevent the problems from occurring in the first place.  Today you have just such an opportunity!

Hi, my name is Lee Hansen and I’m the founder and director of The Global Corner International Learning Center – not to be confused with the Global Learning Academy, Pensacola’s newest Elementary School.  We are The Global Corner.

For the past 4 years we have been bringing the world to life for elementary students in public, private, and homeschool settings through our in-school Passport Program.  Each year we focus on a country and provide exciting, hands-on activities that help kids understand its language, geography, culture, art, literature, history – even its foods.  According to one young second grader, it was his “best day ever!!!”

In addition to giving students their best days ever, we do this in order to meet The Global Corner’s long-term goal of creating a local workforce that speaks multiple languages and understands other cultures.  Imagine this future workforce – one that is unique in the country - one that helps our community attract international companies as well as domestic companies to enhance our economy and the standard of living for all our citizens.  At The Global Corner, we are working hard to make that happen, in fact, we’ve averaged more than 5000 students per year, leading them on more than 22,000 virtual adventures since we started in 2008.

Our in-school program is designed to whet the appetites of elementary students, to set a spark burning, to get them interested in learning about the world around them.  This introductory program has increased interest in learning about the world.  In fact several school librarians have called me to ask what our future countries will be.  Seems they can’t keep books on our current and past countries on the shelves. 

Because of this success, we believe it’s time to move on to the next step – providing an in-depth look at other countries.  We think this is a great way to expand The Global Corner’s outreach.  With this IMPACT grant, we will develop the first manifestation of this expanded outreach.  It will be a summer program that will allow students to spend two weeks really delving into the culture.

In collaboration with UWF’s Explore Summer Program, we’ll use your IMPACT grant money to create the Your Summer Passport to the World.  Kids will have the opportunity not only to learn about the focus country, but – through the magic of technology – will even be able to communicate with their counterparts there.  Imagine a young scholar – who has never traveled outside of Escambia County – being able to learn about Russia by talking with a girl her own age from St. Petersburg.  Imagine the impact of that experience – for both children.  Throughout the two-week program, our young scholars will keep a journal of all the things they have learned.  For the culminating event, they will then use their newly-gained knowledge to create a multi-media presentation about the country.  We’ll digitally record their presentation and post to our website so that students and teachers around the region, across the country – even around the world – can download it for use in their own classrooms.  Imagine the impact – it keeps going and going!

In our grant proposal, two major costs are the development of the curriculum and purchase of the equipment.  We want to make sure that the curriculum is not only fun and challenging, but that it also makes our students begin to do some higher order thinking.  Not just learning facts, but trying to understand why some things are so different from their lives here – and why they have some things in common.  The curriculum will also need to exploit the cutting-edge technologies that are out there today and facilitate measuring the effectiveness of the program in order to fine-tune our methods and material.  The equipment purchased will also be state of the art – and hopefully user friendly to even those like me who are still trying to figure out their smart phone. 

The great news is that the things purchased with your IMPACT funds are reusable.  The curriculum developed can be used as a template for future summer programs, as well as for our in-school program.  And the equipment?  Well, let’s just say I’m extremely frugal.  We will use that equipment until all of the electrons are completely used up.   

Now, one thing we’ve found over the past four years is that oftentimes the children who can least afford the program need it the most.  Working with foundations, local businesses, and we’ll leverage the increased awareness that the Impact grant provides to raise scholarship money to ensure that motivated students can attend, whether their parents can afford to send them or not.

I know some of you may be thinking – it’s a summer program, even if the curriculum and equipment will be reused – how much impact can that really have?  I want you to know about a nine year-old girl.  She was a Junior Girl Scout.  At one troop meeting, the girls had a visit from a mother who was from Japan.  This mom told the girls about her home country.  The girls got to try on a kimono and try out some chopsticks.  The mom wrote each girl’s name in Japanese so they could see what another alphabet looked like.  The year was 1968 and that Girl Scout was me.  Now, I can’t say for certain that that experience led me to travel the world, to live in Japan, to learn other languages, or even to start The Global Corner and impact tens of thousands of kids in NW Florida.  But I know you will agree that none of us knows where the seeds we plant today will blossom.   

And so, you have the opportunity with this IMPACT grant to not only bring the world to life for kids throughout our community – but to bring life to our community and our economy as we press forward to a vibrant, internationally-focused future.  Domo Arigato Gozaimasu!  Thank you very much!

Five years ago when I put together the plan for the first year of The Global Corner, I knew I wanted to enhance the lives of the elementary school students in Northwest Florida.  My goal was to help them learn about the world so that when they grew up they would be able to not only enhance our community, but also succeed in the global arena.  I think we are well on the way to achieving that goal – our feedback has been universally positive.  Teachers report that their students are still talking about what they learned at The Global Corner weeks after the visit.  Librarians report that they can’t keep books about the focus country on the shelves.  Parents tell me that their children are so excited about the things that they have learned with The Global Corner, that they want to teach the whole family when they get home from school.