HARVARD WORLD MODEL UNITED NATIONS
SPRING 2011, ISSUE 1
THE WORLDMUN SPIRIT
INSIDE THIS ISSUE
Recap: January Celebrations
Spotlight: The Founders
of WorldMUN
Recap: Twenty Years
of WorldMUN
Close Up: Singapore 2011
The Resolution Project Update
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A LETTER FROM THE TEAM
Dear WorldMUN Community,
Hello! With less than a week left until our 20th conference in Singapore, it is our
pleasure to share our excitement with you. Our team is in the process of packing
our bags, finishing last-minute tasks, and reviewing our study guides. While we
may not be looking forward to the 24-hour flight, we are eagerly awaiting our two-
week-long adventure in Southeast Asia. The conference will be held from March
14-18 and our team plans to attend a post-conference trip afterwards in Bali,
Indonesia with a large group of other delegates. The 90 degree beaches will be a big
shift from the 20 degree icy streets of Cambridge. Fun times ahead!
It is also our pleasure to announce that our 20th anniversary celebration at the Down
Town Association in New York this past January was a huge success. It was attended
by our current team members, the original organizing team (many of whom were
seeing each other for the first time since graduating), and representatives from
every class in between. This even marks a new point in our organizations alumni
outreach efforts. In future years we expect more and more of these reunions with
even larger attendances.
We are planning for a summer reunion to be held in New York and will be in touch
with more information. Please let us know if you would like to help in organizing
the event and share with us suggesstions for how we can best connect with and
engage our incredible pool of alumni. Thank you for your continuing support
through the years!
Best Wishes,
The WorldMUN 2011 Team
THE WORLDMUN SPIRIT

SPOTLIGHT: THE FOUNDERS OF WORLDMUN

Top: The original 1992

WorldMUN Secretariat,
led by Secretary-General
Geraldine Acuña

Left: The founding WorldMUN

team at their hotel in Poland
during the first conference in
our organization’s history.

If you have any more pictures

of past conferences, please send
them to strategy@worldmun.
org. We would love to have
them for our archives!
 SPRING 2011, ISSUE 1

RECAP: TWENTY YEARS OF WORLDMUN

Despite the freezing cold temperatures of New York, this
January, the largest reunion of past and present World-
MUN members gathered at the Down Town Association
to celebrate our organization’s upcoming twentieth confer-
ence.

The evening began at 4 PM with cocktails and appetizers.

Many of our team members had arrived directly from their
winter breaks and were extremely happy to see each other
and catch up on what happened with their individual J-
terms and traveling adventures.

As the evening continued, alums began arriving at our

event. It was amazing to see recent graduates and al-
ums from the original class of 1992 meet and discuss
their WorldMUN years as well as their lives and experi-
ences since graduating. A few members of the founding
team (pictured above) hadn’t seen each other since their
Commencement and were eager to catch up. We were
extremely pleased with the fact that every single confer-
ence was represented at our event and a good number of
Secretary-Generals were able to rally members of their
class to attend.

The highlight of the night was dinner and (as per World-
MUN tradition) various team members would volunteer
stories and aneocdotes from their individual conferences.
Many of these tales were funny, heartwarming, and in the
case of the original conference in Miedzyzdroje, Poland,
extremely impressive and bewildering. Many of our cur-
rent team members were awestruck by how past confer-
ences were able to pull off their incredible feats and it
served as further inspiration for us to do the very best job
we could with our upcoming conference in Singapore.

At the end of the night, it was great to see people ex-

changing business cards, e-mails, and phone numbers.
The WorldMUN alumni database benefited heavily from
attendees volunteering information on other friends and
updating their own contact information. As an organiza-
tion, it is our sincere hope that we can continue to have
events such as this and expand the incredible alumni
network that we are so lucky to have.
Top: Members from our original WorldMUN team.
Center Right: Current team members share stories from
their winter breaks.
Bottom Right: The past and present of WorldMUN pose for a
photo after dinner.
UPDATE ON THE RESOLUTION PROJECT
Resolution continues to make excellent progress, and the end of 2010 and beginning of 2011 have been
incredibly exciting for us. First, on November 10th, we hosted Resolve 2010, Resolution’s inaugural fundraiser
and launch party. With over 150 people in attendance, we enjoyed a wonderful evening with a great auction and
a presentation by one of our Resolution Fellows working in Kenya. The event was a huge success, raising nearly
$70,000, which will cover all the ventures for this coming year, as well as the development of the next-generation
Resolution Network.
Our Resolution Fellows from 2009 and 2010 continue their great work around the world. Carlos and his
Green Garbage venture team in Venezuela have successfully launched their recycling pilot project in Caracas and
have received siting authority for Venezuela’s first garbage separation plant! Jessica and Mauro of our UNIDAS
team are working with shelters for battered and trafficked women, pairing them with microfinance and job-
training opportunities in Ecuador. Alex and Nick of our IT Empowerment in Rwanda team are working with
subsistence farmers and their families in a school in Rwanda to introduce them to basic computer skills. Betsy and
Dan of our Micro-Irrigation in Kenya project have sited 13 pilot plots which are generating great data from the
first full growing season with the new drip-kits. Dheer and his team for the Indian Monsoons venture are working
with their university to develop engineering plans for their water capture and groundwater revitalization project.
And finally, Shaan and his Health2Home team spent time in Uganda earlier this year gathering data and building
relationships with the Ministry of Health and four local villages to help launch their text-based healthcare project.
Lastly, we are working with some talented developers to meet a late 2011 launch for the next generation
Resolution Network. This promises to be a robust platform of web-based tools that will allow our Fellows, their
peers (including WorldMUN alumni and former delegates), mentors, and the Resolution team to interact and
crowdsource opportunities, best-practices, advice, etc. As always, you can check out www.resolutionproject.org
and/or reach George and Oliver at george@resolutionproject.org and olibby@resolutionproject.org to learn more
about what Resolution is doing and how you can help. We anticipate a very exciting 2011 and much more news to
come.

The Changing Scape of MUN:

As the Secretariat packs up and heads off to
Singapore, we would like to share some details
about the 20th session of World Model United
Nations. For the very first time ever, WorldMUN
will have more delegates coming from Asia than
from any other continent. This represents a larg-
er change in the global MUN circuit and as an
organization, we welcome the increasing diver-
sity around the world that MUN conferences ap-
peal to.

In order to further diversify the conference, and to allow delegates from all backgrounds to attend
WorldMUN, we established a positive financial aid program this year, and successfully distributed
$30,000 in financial aid and fee waivers to delegations, helping defray the cost of attending World-
MUN. This amount marks double the amount of financial aid distributed in recent conferences. A
consequence of this program is the huge leap in the number of developing nations represented this
year, with over 200 delegates from Indonesia, and a further 150 from South Asia, and countries as far
apart as Jamaica and Afghanistan. We hope that this initiative will grow in future years as we seek to
uphold the title of being the world’s most diverse MUN conference, bringing the WorldMUN Spirit to
youth across the globe.

the worldmun spirit is a publication of Harvard World Model United Nations at Harvard
College. All rights reserved. Photos courtesy of the Singapore Tourism Board.