College of the Atlantic junior Michael Keller and first-year student Juan Carlos Soriano Yabar returned from an international summit in Chicago recently, having been given a jumpstart in their plans for projects to make life better in their respective homelands.

The two were invited to attend the Global Engagement Summit at Northwestern University based on specific international projects they each hope to implement. There, along with 100 other committed student leaders from 15 nations, the pair spent five intense days learning how they could develop and launch successful projects.

Keller hails from Charlottesville, VA, where he has focused on issues related to the city's growing refugee population. Having witnessed a citizenship ceremony, where refugees from Afghanistan, Serbia, Croatia and Myanmar spoke about the meaning of becoming United States citizens-what they liked and did not like about their adopted country-Keller developed the idea of institutionalizing this experience within local government.

Ultimately, Keller hopes to create a public forum for both recent and long-term asylum seekers to share their insights into democracy with city leaders. This would be an opportunity for people to speak about issues such as having to have a car because there is such limited mass transit and pedestrian access to schools, jobs and stores.

During the summit, Keller led English as a second language activities with Spanish-speaking immigrants in Chicago, spoke with a fourth grade class on immigration and citizenship, and gained new perspectives on nonprofit development, management and grant writing.

Soriano is from Lima, Peru, but spent summers in the highlands of the Huaylas Valley north of Lima, where tourism has interrupted an agricultural economy and accelerated the melting of the glaciers, the primary tourism draw. Topping that irony, the tourists seldom engage local guides, so their presence has little benefit for the indigenous population. Soriano hopes to design a business of environmentally sensitive intercultural adventure programs that will be run by the local communities. He is currently taking business and management classes at COA to fulfill his dream of creating sustainable businesses that will boost the economy of the communities in the Huaylas Valley and Huascaran National Park, while also preserving the environment.

While at the summit, the two chose 15 workshops out of 40 offered in such topics as grant writing, microfinance, networking human relations and how to identify potential funders for one's projects.

The mission of Global Engagement Summit is to build the capacity of the next generation of global change leaders to cross borders and partner with new communities to produce responsible, sustainable solutions to shared global problems. It began in 2006 as the International Youth Volunteerism Summit.

College of the Atlantic is a small college on the Maine coast awarding a BA and MPhil in Human Ecology. It was founded in 1969 on the premise that education should go beyond understanding the world as it is to enabling students to actively participate in shaping its future. The collaborative, interdisciplinary, experiential approach ensures that students' quest for scientific, spiritual, social and artistic knowledge comes with the depth of an individualized curriculum, developing creative thinkers and doers. Education is active, hands-on, often through original sources. Students are fully involved in the community, in governance, in their own education.