Last fall, a group of LCS students applied to be on the LCS Global Ideas Institute (GII) team to tackle a global issue collaboratively. The GII program is operated through the Munk School at the University of Toronto and this is the first year that Lakefield has participated. “The GII was conceived in the Asian Institute at the Munk School and led by Professor Joseph Wong to provide intensive research and learning opportunities for high school students.”
Since last year, the LCS GII team has met once per month to hear from professionals and work with mentors at the University of Toronto to solve a pressing global problem. This year’s challenge was to answer the question: “How can we bolster the digital safety of marginalized communities?”
On Friday, the GII team pitched their solution at the GII Virtual Symposium alongside students from across Ontario and Canada. Congratulations to Halle Lawson ’21, Caroline Chen ’21, Branton Hung ’21, Dylan Clement ’21, Yeseo Kim ’22, and Emilia Volke ’21 for their diligent work on this project.
Taking part in the GII taught me how to respond to real-life problems, such as the digital divide between people of different socioeconomic statuses. Our monthly workshop with graduate students at the Munk School allowed us to integrate different frameworks, which are used at professional levels, into our own solution. We also received frequent feedback from the mentors, which pushed us to come up with a better solution. Overall, I learned that we need to get down to the very heart of the matter (i.e. the causes of a problem) in order to propose a solution that is efficient, equitable, and feasible.
Yeseo Kim ’22
When I decided to join the GII team I hoped to gain more knowledge about the world we live in and its people. With this opportunity, I wanted to gain skills and an understanding of how we can tackle issues and help marginalized groups feel safer. I can now say that the program helped me understand some issues better and taught me how I can deal with real-life problems.
Emilia Volke ’21
