Information in this article was provided by John Remmell, Model UN Director at Santa Margarita Catholic High School, and Kevin Felix Chan, Best Delegate Co-Founder and observer at SOCOMUN.
On September 28th, Santa Margarita Catholic High School (SMCHS) hosted the world’s largest one-day Model United Nations conference. Nearly 1,500 students from over 30 high schools in Southern California were in attendance. Additionally, Jan Neruda Grammar School from Prague in the Czech Republic traveled to SMCHS to participate.
South Orange County Model United Nations Conference (SOCOMUN) is unique among similar conferences due to its large size for a one-day-long conference. Other one-day conferences are typically on a much smaller scale, but the organizers of SOCOMUN are unafraid to go big or go home!
SMCHS students Lyndsey Issa ’21 and Amanda Duffy ’21 were key organizers of the conference. SOCOMUN is a great chance for novice MUNers in high school to learn about the typical Model United Nations experience, as well as learning about the real United Nations. This year, SOCOMUN happened to coincide with the 74th session of the United Nation’s General Assembly in New York. As the real UN went back to business, so did student delegates at SMCHS.
The theme of this year’s conference was “Learning from the Past, Leading the Future.” At the conference, high school students served as delegates discussing global issues such as extreme poverty, global hunger and gender equality. A key differentiator of SOCOMUN is that topics for all committees mirrored actual initiatives currently being promoted by the United Nations – freshmen novice topics were aligned with the United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and non-freshmen novice topics were aligned with UNODC’s Education for Justice (E4J) topics. Alignment to the SDGs and E4J is something that is relatively rare among Model UN conferences, but it is certainly the direction that the actual UN wants to head in.
This year, SOCOMUN also brought in many different initiatives from the wider community to their conference, including a Best Delegate-run Advisor Workshop and the MUN Impact program. Overall, the conference was incredibly successful and looks forward to another great iteration next fall!
