Podcast: Abby Falik on the Benefits of Global Service

We’re listening to the Getting Smart podcast. Where we unpack what is new and innovative in education. I’m your host Jessica and today we’re talking with Abby Falick. Abby grew up with parents committed to traveling the world and never the usual tourist traps. After high school she wanted to get close to the issues that she really cared about

but couldn’t get into peace corpse without a college degree. Abby quickly realized there just wasn’t a good option for high school graduates to learn and serve abroad and she knew she’d have to fix that. Ten years ago Abby started Global Citizen Year to expand access to life changing global immersion experiences between high school and college.

She knew these experiences were uniquely well suited to unlock courage, shape identity and develop leadership. Every year Global Citizen Year places about 150 learners in an international internship. They live with the local family and are part of a regional cohort. The results are transformational and lifelong. Let’s listen in as Abby describes her journey and the program that has changed a thousand lives.

Abby Falick welcome to the Getting Smart podcast. Thank you I’m so delighted to be here. Abby if you grew up in Berkeley why’d you go to Stanford? I guess I can never live that one down huh? Yeah I am grateful to have had the opportunity to go to Stanford and I have to say that I still have

very deep Berkeley loyalties from having grown up here and living here. You kind of put together your own international development degree at Stanford? Exactly yep. You also did a master’s there? I did in international comparative education and when I heard that that existed I felt like

oh that’s it that nails it those are the three things I’m interested in. And you know the the through line began much earlier for me. I was very fortunate to have opportunities to travel as a kid and grew up with parents who had decided that international exposure was going to be a key part of how they raised me and my two younger siblings and it had come from their own experience of quitting their jobs in their early 30s and spending

down their savings and traveling around the world and recognizing that there is a huge world out there and it’s wildly unequal and can be you know deeply formative for us to come face to face with how the rest of the world lives and how the rest of the world sees us as a means for really shifting how we see ourselves and so it was so by the time you went to Stanford how many countries had you been in?

I have no idea. Didn’t didn’t keep track but a couple dozen. Honestly don’t know what I do know is that we never went to the standard places so I had never been to Europe by the time I got to college but I had spent time in southern Africa and southeast Asia and Central America and those experiences as I look back were among the most formative parts of my education and they didn’t have anything to do with my formal education and that’s

really where a lot of the insight that underlies what we do at Global Citizen Era emerged. We’ll come back to that. So you have this great Stanford education. Why do you think you needed to add a Harvard MBA to that? Oh I’m an interesting case here because I’m the first to quote Mark Twain where you know he says don’t let your schooling interfere with your education which is my mantra in life and in many

ways the mission for the organization I’ve built and lead and the broader movement that says education extends so far beyond the schooling and so far beyond the institutions and the pedigree and the methodology and I’m sure we’ll get into a little bit more about that and how outdated it all is and the opportunities to really reboot it. Was any part of the Harvard MBA relevant? Does it feel relevant to you now?

Highly. I mean I’m a huge proponent of people with social impact orientation going to business school and it was the last place in the world as somebody who grown up in Berkeley and had worked only in the nonprofit sector often in at this intersection of education and international development. I mean I actually didn’t know anybody who’d been to business school and let alone Harvard Business School and I it was kind of a consistent through line for me of if I’m going

to do something I want to leave my comfort zone in the most extreme way possible which was certainly what HBS was for me and I also didn’t go straight so I spent about five years working in New York between college and then deciding that there was a training and skill set and perspective that I could get from returning to a formal instructional context and so I went I went to business school on a mission I recently revisited my application essay and I was already quite focused on how I was

going to use that education in the service of launching what has become Global Citizen Year. So I’m incredibly grateful it certainly you know I was a fish out of water challenged my thinking helped me develop skills and perspectives on a network that have been instrumental and I think largely just gave me confidence to really be bold and clear about what I was launching. I won the pitch competition at the end of my two years there which was a great boost of support and felt like

okay this is no longer just something rattling around in my head that I’ve been thinking about since I was 18 and desperately wanted to find it something like Global Citizen Year but couldn’t but it’s actually something that I’ve now prepared myself to lead and it is my opportunity privilege and responsibility to take this leap and make it happen and so I’ve been at it ever since. It is sort of wonderfully ironic that you’ve got a terrific education from the best institutions in

the world and that you I think most appreciate the formative experiences that in your own life and for other people that often happen outside of a formal setting right it’s sort of wonderfully ironic. Yeah and I am very very aware of how much privilege I have in carrying those credentials the doors they’ve opened the you know cold emails I can send from an HBS account that get responses and in part that’s you know that’s part of why I opted into those trainings because I knew that

that is a lot of how we still think about how power flows and so I feel like having had those experiences and being able to carry that credential and now applying it to what I believe the world needs most is really my life’s work and I feel incredibly grateful to get to do both things. Abby what’s the origin story of Global Citizen Year? Well it goes way back I almost touched on it by describing how my parents you know were traveling

the world in 1978 and took a year off to re-examine their lives and their values and priorities and so by the time I finished high school and I’d been a good student but sort of the excellent sheep mode I would say of you know really good at what I was doing checking the boxes got into Stanford but I was very aware that there was something missing in my formal education and I was hungry to do something outside of the classroom that was going to stretch me

emotionally and experientially that was going to get me proximate to issues that might break my heart or blow it open in some way to things I really cared about I didn’t want to just file along and go straight into my freshman year of college just because that’s what everybody said was you know the path I was supposed to be on and I vividly remember I called the Peace Corps on the phone I wanted to do something like that I you know it was ironic to me that the Peace Corps required me

to have a college degree which I understand but so they said no but the only other opportunities available to somebody like me at that transition would have been to do some kind of religious mission so the Mormons send tens of thousands of young people at that age to serve around the world or military service which is also an option at age 18 and so those were really the early that the rejection for the Peace Corps my scan of the marketplace and recognizing that there wasn’t

an opportunity for somebody my age to spend a year doing something that wasn’t in the service of you know God or the military or country but really in the service of humanity and of learning myself that that didn’t exist became a driving passion for me and and by the time I got to college and I ended up going straight to college because I couldn’t find something like global citizen year I had the seeds of this idea already germinating and I had a a folder on my laptop or desktop or

whatever we were using it was called master plan and I think if anybody had looked over my shoulder and actually seen that I would have been mortified at the time but now I look back and it’s you know it makes me smile to see that I had this instinct that I was here to build something that was creating opportunities for other young people to have transformative experiences in the real world as a formative part of their education so what’s the mission of global citizen year is it is it

about exploration is it about service is it a combination of those global citizen year uses the power of a deep global immersion between high school and college to unlock curiosity, conviction and courage in a new generation of leaders so we recognize that the the intensity and pressure that I felt as I finished high school has only ratcheted it up you know it’s exponentially more frantic and frazzled and and oriented toward a you know a high school being

this high stakes game to get into college and the college admissions boards valuing perfect records rather than authentic exploration I mean you can’t really try things or follow your curiosity if you’re afraid of ever failing and I think we’ve set the system up to disincentivize again creativity and and exploration which is often the way that you uncover what you’re actually passionate about and so you know global citizen years of response to the clear and urgent need

to give young people from all backgrounds the opportunity to step off that treadmill to realize that it there’s not even really a path there anyway and to connect with themselves with a community of peers and with a context around the world we talk about experiences of life with alongside the global majority in a way that that shapes who you are and who you want to become it lays the foundation for how you’re going to approach your higher education it shapes your

values and identity and convictions and in our experience it gives you the courage to do the hard thing and to stand up for what you believe in so how does it how does it work how long is it how do you prepare and where do young people go so every year we reach out and recruit the most talented high school graduates we can find from across the country and now around the world and significantly you know in this context of thinking about you know getting smarter and new

visions for education we’re really innovating on how we think about selecting for talent and selecting for leadership potential so we don’t screen for test scores and grades they’re not a part of our admissions process by design we recognize that there are you know extraordinary young people who um where the traditional approach to schooling may not have been a match for them or the way that they were able to best exhibit their their troupe at Heldt-A-Leed so we’re looking

for kids who are curious who’ve taken initiative who’ve persuaded their peers to follow them who’ve started something from scratch so we take them through an application and selection process which includes interviews and role plays and case studies and then each year we select a cohort and invest in a group of young people who represent our society’s diversity so it’s a need-blind admissions process and significantly more than half of our incoming cohort self-identify

as as people of color and 80 percent are receiving some level of need-based financial aid about a third receive a fully funded scholarship from us and those are kids who are low income Pell Grant eligible when they get to college and I think that diversity of the cohort has been really one of the hallmarks of of what we’ve done so so we’re using this transition between high school and college to ignite a sense of purpose and for the equivalent of an academic year our fellows we call them live

with a family in a community in Africa Latin America or Asia and they work as an apprentice supporting a local effort that’s advancing education health sustainability and our learning model wraps coaching and curriculum around the lived experience so we’re preparing emerging leaders in a way that classroom learning alone cannot and because our fellows stay longer and go deeper than traditional study abroad or quick travel programs that are often fly by or even the industry it’s emerging

around volunteerism because of the the length and depth of this immersion our fellows develop insights that shape them and that guide their higher education and equip them to be leaders over the course of their lives so that’s the that’s the core fellowship and then we are using that as a demonstration project we’re partnering with colleges with companies with communities around the world so that someday this becomes the new pathway and a new way of preparing young people to be the leaders

that the world needs now how do you deal with languages and language acquisition so more than 90 percent of our fellows come back with high proficiency to fluency in the language of their community which is something we are delighted about far too few Americans speak another language but we’ve decided strategically that we’re not going to require we don’t have a language requirement on the admissions end so it would skew just toward the you know very small

subset of of well-financed schools where kids are having a good language education and they’re few and far between so we’ve decided that we’ll take you even if you’ve not had the language exposure we partner with Rosetta Stone and Duolingo both so that our fellows are able to over the summer before they go do sort of a baseline preparation and then the heart of the learning experience the language learning comes from full immersion plus tutoring and coaching

on the ground that we provide that will be challenging for for some young people how much choice of the place or type of learning experience do young people get so we ask them to tell us all kinds of things about themselves and what they’re looking to get out of the year we found that sometimes what they think they want is not what they actually want or not what they need but we do ask so they typically get their first choice of which country to be in

and their first choice of of what sector they’re working in whether it’s education the environment health social enterprise and we’ve we’ve created a we call it our our matching tool but it’s an online platform think of sort of an airbnb kind of database where our fellows once they’re admitted come in they post a profile and they’re able to scroll through various placement opportunities and select what feels like the best match for them do the fellows ever get an opportunity to

travel in their host country they do the emphasis is on really becoming an integral part of your family and your community and so we’re sensitive to what happens when you are leaving all the time and you can’t make a consistent connection or commitment to the place where you’re working so they’re each granted a couple of weeks of personal travel we call it where and we encourage them to wait until they’ve got the language down and understand more of the context of the place

where they are but i’ll say that it’s the whole thing is an interplay between individual experience so you are living with a family and working each day in a community typically either on your own or with another fellow in that area then you’ve got a cohort of 10 fellows in your region and then you’ve got a number of different regions that would make up the whole country cohort and each month or so that whole cohort in in your region comes together for ongoing training so they’re

training seminars that bring the group together and often those will be hosted in different parts of the parts of the country to give our fellows exposure to places outside of the community are the fellows ever placed together or everybody has an individual placement so the placement the family the place where they live and work is individual to them they may have a buddy in town and they’re you know the closest fellow may also be a bus ride away

in the regional cohort exactly that’s a yeah that’s a neat structure it feels like just enough support but enough of an individual immersion that they get the full benefit what do you what do you think what do you know that fellows get out of this experience it’s profound and it can be hard to measure but impossible to ignore i’d say i have the you know pleasure of spending time with them before they go welcoming them when they come back and then

following their journeys we’re almost 10 years in so our oldest alumni are nearly a decade out of the program and it’s just undeniable the way they move through the world they the way they they practice curiosity before judgment the way they are committed to equity and challenging inequity where they see it so that they can advance opportunity for all there’s an integrity to how they’re aligning their life and their education with the the convictions that they have and then

there’s a courage which is there there’s a willingness to do the hard thing and i think when you’re a high school graduate you’re graduating from high school and you opt to step off that path there’s a muscle that begins to be developed that says well a there is no path and b there might be real power in being in the driver’s seat of my education yes and my life and and we watch that they’re more willing to take risks and sort of reorient around around a baseline again integrity

with with what they care about as opposed to just being swept along and and doing the next thing because it’s because of the peer pressure or the FOMO. Abby have you um i’m just curious if you’ve come to appreciate that the outcomes that you just described appear to become becoming more important to to young people and and society than ever the change that we’re going through now this innovation economy seems to make these outcomes an even stronger priority than

10 years ago when you started it yeah and and we’re seeing it in this surge of interest in what we do where i think we were just a little bit ahead of our time i’m grateful to some some i don’t know what to call it but sort of guiding vision or calling that i’ve been advancing for a long time but just readying ourselves for this moment where there’s a growing recognition that we are not preparing kids well certainly for college and definitely for the world and i think there’s

also a a piece of this that’s particularly pertinent right now in thinking about the the value and importance of americans in particular having global experiences and at a time when we’re watching xenophobia and isolationism research what will it take to reintegrate america into a global context how are we preparing young people to not see it as us and them but as a as a we and i don’t mean to be kumbaya about that but we’re not we just stand no chance of actually effectively combating the

global challenges that we are confronting as humans on a shared earth whether it’s climate change or poverty any equity migration i mean these trends affect us all and cannot be solved by one country or one perspective alone and so so much of what we’re doing is building that wave of new leaders who can see and act across sector lines across disciplines across lines of difference across cultural lines as well i mean we believe that’s that’s what the world needs now and it’s

such a far cry from what our our schools are set up to to provide abby i i think a lot of our listeners will find appealing much of what you do and certainly the outcomes that you achieve and they’re probably wondering how they might incorporate more of these experiences into secondary and post-secondary learning how we can begin to blend these informal learning experiences with with formal uh do you have a sense of that yeah i think you know we we have begun to really

have begun to really think about leadership and training as a practice not an arrival point not a position and that it’s not exclusive to this transition between high school and college where this kind of transformative learning can occur we have focused there because we know it’s such a sweet spot developmentally where a young person has the maturity to leave home but they haven’t yet fixed their prefrontal cortex and their identity and their values it’s all still in formation and

there’s a reason that that cultures and religions and countries around the world have focused on that age 17 18 19 uh for creating rights of passage into young adulthood um so for us that’s really where we’ve focused our intervention but a lot of what we’re trying to demonstrate by example are opportunities to rethink how we teach and how we learn in the k-12 system and then in higher education as well to start with the end in mind to step back and say what are the characteristics

that are most essential to thriving and leading in today’s world um you know it’s probably curiosity and empathy it’s courage it’s an ability to be innovative it’s the whole set of things that the bots and ai can’t do and yet we’re still teaching to tests that robots can already pass so there’s a rethinking around how do we blend emotion experience and academic training in new ways that unlock the things that are uniquely human uh abby this makes me think about our friends at

widdle old school and studios we’ve been a design partner for the last couple years for a global network that’s opening schools in china and the us um this this month in uh september 19 and um they’ve tried to incorporate experiences that get at the same outcomes by having each campus be super place-based or they use city as classroom where students have the opportunity to connect with a network of global centers of excellence where every student learns at least one other language

where they have an opportunity to connect projects to these global centers and spend a week at a at a global center on another campus and then plan a term or two abroad um so just an interesting uh systemic design that attempts to get at some of the outcomes that you do in your um in your fellowship i i do appreciate the addition of the service component that you have that these each of the fellows are working on an impact project yeah um and i think there’s a

we need all of it we need you know a reinvention of the k-12 that orients around things that are harder to measure harder to standardize but ultimately so much more important to do and you know i watch how we’ve constrained the the teaching and learning to be um things that can be demonstrated on a couple of standardized measures and i you know i also watched at a ted conference a couple of years ago there’s a japanese engineer who was demonstrating her

a i that she had uh developed to pass the college entrance exam and so you know we’re watching as it fills out these multiple choice questions and gets the answers right but then it blew us all away by responding to the qualitative essay prompt uh as an a i where it sort of took the question split it into parts and then scanned the interwebs to to write the response and there’s a light bulb moment for me of recognizing that we could tinker for the rest of our days

with the current system as it is and and even focus on you know improving standardized test outcomes or equalizing those outcomes but if we’re aiming for the wrong thing we’re wasting our time and energy um and so we really need to to step back and say what are today’s kids most need to learn and how are we going to redesign the the systems around it how could colleges incorporate a global citizen year or programs like it so and we work both at

the high school and the college side so i’ll start on the high schools um we have launched a network of educators on high schools across the country and now around the world uh where where we’re identifying the educator sometimes it’s an administrator sometimes it’s a an ap geography teacher or a spanish teacher a teacher who sees the value in sending the right kids to have a global citizen year before they head to college and so we work closely with them to help them understand

what we’re looking for what a what the the the um the most qualified applicants uh exhibit in high school and then we we work with them to help identify each year on campus the you know a really exceptional young person to nominate for global citizen year on the college side we have about a dozen formal arrangements with colleges and universities from Notre Dame, Tufts, UNC, Duke, Middlebury uh a couple of state schools as well where um we have we have relationships that range

from these schools just you know having created a a page on their admissions website that encourages their applicants or admitted students to consider taking a a transformative year we hate the term gap year because it’s the wrong metaphor and has all kinds of associations that are different from what we actually stand for so we’ve worked with the colleges to really reframe what would this transformative year look like um and then we have more integrated relationships with a set of schools

that look like joint admissions shared financial aid and in some cases course credit and I think as I look to the future of of where this all goes as as college comes undone and unbundled you know the the degree in credential and learning come unbundled from the the four-year campus or classroom experience I think they’re really exciting opportunities to credential and a credit the learning that happens during a global citizen year so that it’s not added time and cost

but it’s actually an integrated part of your college experience and you know it’s not it’s not a winning pitch right now to say oh we’re going to just make college longer and more expensive and that makes no sense to anyone but we could say we’re going to make college much more efficient impactful and uh you know a higher ROI because we’re we’re intervening in a way that helps deliver kids who are on fire about what they want to do with their education they know their why and we

know that that makes all the difference in how they perform at college and beyond so that’s that’s the bold vision abby this is a it’s a super exciting program it’s a challenging business model with a need blind entrance that must mean that you you need to raise a good deal of money are you seeking financial partners for the program yeah we always are and I spend a lot of my time raising money but it’s it again just sort of feels like a an opportunity

to invite people to do what they’re hoping and trying to do with their philanthropy through our mechanism which is changing young lives in a really profound way so our business model looks like a school and we charge tuition to families who can pay and then there’s a sliding scale down to nothing for kids who need financial support so I’m always focused on raising money for the scholarship fund and just to give you a sense I mean the how much money we can raise for scholarships

is the limiting factor on how many amazing kids we can support each year so we could have admitted twice the number of really exceptional young people into our incoming cohort um had we had the scholarship funds to do it how many students in your next cohort we’ll have 150 uh incoming and we have they’re joining a cohort of a thousand alumni from from our early days abby where can people find out more about you and global citizen year online best places our

website global citizen year dot org and you’ll see links to videos about the program experience blogs that our fellows keep during their international um immersion so they’re all posting whether it’s it’s photography and video and and reflections on their experience um well database of of writing and thought leadership that I’m really focused on right now which is how beyond the core fellowship which is both huge and small in the context of making a dent in in

how we’re approaching education for a whole generation how can we use these insights how can we scale the impact not just by scaling our core fellowship which we intend to do but by scaling the the ideas around new forms of teaching and learning and and the the overlooked and transformative possibility of of reimagining the transition between high school and college abby philic we really appreciate your uh your life’s mission those global citizen

year is a great program uh I wish every young person could have an experience like this we’d encourage um high school and college educators uh to check out global citizen year dot org think about uh how you could nominate a young person for the program how you could financially support the program how you could create similar programs where more young people would have access to these kind of experiences um it’s transformative work abby thanks for

being on the Getting Smart podcast thank you it’s been really fun thanks to abby for joining us today as you can probably agree the global citizen year program is truly remarkable we love the blind admissions and her commitment to equity as abby said we live in a world where there is an urgent need for kids of all backgrounds to connect with themselves their peers in the context around the world to shape values and identity and build the courage to change the world I don’t know about

you but I definitely wish I could have had that opportunity when I was leaving high school all right listeners that’s it for today’s show but be sure to rate and review the podcast so more of your friends and other innovators can find us and if you haven’t already you know the drill hit subscribe so you don’t miss out on any future episodes thanks for tuning in for the Getting Smart podcast this is Jessica signing off

you yeah you