Model UN has been more important than ever this past school year with a backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic impacting student learning and human connections at schools and with global issues and social justice issues affecting everyday lives. Virtual Model UN has been effective in connecting students within their own schools and providing them with an opportunity to engage with the world outside their homes. Model UN has given students a space to learn and debate about world issues, including social justice issues they may have been experiencing in real life. And Model UN has helped students build and maintain valuable skills in public speaking, debating, negotiating, communicating, and teamwork that are so necessary as people had to isolate and as politics become increasingly polarized.
That said, it was challenging to make Model UN happen this year. Students and teachers not only had to navigate virtual school and the back-and-forth of reopening plans, but had to navigate how to run a virtual MUN club on top of that. Model UN conference organizers and delegates had to pivot and figure out how to do MUN in the virtual format. Participants may have faced mental health challenges, financial challenges, or Zoom fatigue that hindered their participation in MUN. For some, virtual MUN wasn’t “it” for them, or MUN got cancelled within their own clubs because there was no capacity to support it this year.
But nevertheless, Model UN participants were resilient in making Model UN happen in 2020-2021. YOU made it happen. It became very clear by the end of the Fall semester that MUN is one of the most engaging activities that students could participate in during COVID-19, and that MUN was even helping students thrive.
At Best Delegate, we want to celebrate the different definitions of success in MUN this year. Students, teachers, and conference organizers put a lot of hard work into making MUN happen this year. We want to recognize that virtual Model United Nations IS Model United Nations — this is what Model UN was for almost everyone this year, and will continue to be a legitimate format of Model UN going forward.
We also want to recognize leaders who contributed to MUN in intangible ways besides winning awards and running conferences — and that these should also be captured as success stories in Model UN, too. And we acknowledge that overcoming challenges, or trying to navigate them even if ultimately MUN couldn’t happen at your school this year, is a success story on its own. It all contributes to the larger mission of leadership and making a difference in the world.
Of course, rankings and recognition pieces in the past have created recognition for the community, and many MUN programs have reached out to us asking for these articles this year because it’s important to them — it’s how they want to be recognized. Rankings and recognition help club members feel recognized for their hard work in training, preparing, and participating as delegates. It helps MUN teams with future funding and future membership recruitment. It helps MUN conferences with future delegate registrations. And it helps MUN stand out beyond the MUN community as THE activity that worked in education this year.
Therefore, we will be releasing a series of articles to fulfill the objectives above, including but not limited to the pieces below.
For the College MUN circuit (publishing mid-to-late May):
- Top MUN Leadership Stories: we’ll be asking the community to submit success stories that highlight how their head delegates, conference organizers, or club navigated challenges and achieved their definition of success this school year.
- College All-Star Team: we’ll be asking college MUN delegates on the circuit to nominate leaders who they thought contributed to the betterment of the college MUN circuit this year.
- College Rankings: we’ll be asking college circuit conferences to submit their awards data so that we can recognize the teams that were able to best create active virtual MUN teams this past year.
For High School MUN participants (publishing late May to early June):
- Top MUN Leadership Stories: we’ll be asking the community to submit success stories that highlight how their student officers, advisors, or club navigated challenges and achieved their definition of success this school year.
- The Top High School MUN Teams: we’ll be asking top conferences to submit the names of the award-winning schools so that we can recognize all the teams that were able to best create active virtual MUN programs this year.
One of our Core Values is Open to Feedback. The series above is what our Best Delegate Community Media Team — Noran Morsi, Jamey Battle, Timur Saiful, Teresa Schuster, and Zoey Fisher — will be working on under the guidance of Best Delegate Co-Founder Kevin Felix Chan. We gathered a lot of feedback — ranging from strong opinions having rankings and strong opinions not having rankings — and took into account varying perspectives to determine what works best for the community overall.
We understand not every team will agree with the pieces above based on their experiences, values, or challenges they faced this year. Yet, we do not want to take away from the teams that were able to make MUN happen this year and have asked to be recognized in ways they see fit. We’re also open if you have other ideas of articles that could help recognize the MUN community — feel free to contact our team members about them.
Thank you so much for reading Best Delegate, and for your leadership and contributions to the MUN community. We hope many of you will feel proud to look back at what the MUN community was able to achieve — the various definitions of success despite COVID-19 affecting almost every participant’s MUN experience — during this 2020-2021 school year.
