Most students travel south in the spring to lie on the beach, have fun and forget about hot issues on cold campuses. But two Ohio State students, Shikha Prasad and Viral Patel, traveled to Florida last weekend to attend the Clinton Global Initiative University.
President Bill Clinton hosted the third annual Clinton Global Initiative conference from April 16 to April 18 at the University of Miami. The conference challenges students to address global issues with practical solutions.
Each year, Clinton Global Initiative University hosts a meeting for students, national youth organizations and university officials to discuss solutions to pressing global issues, according to the CGI website.
Prasad and Patel used the conference to craft their own solution to a problem that needs more media attention, South Asians being attacked in Australia. Both students intend to increase media awareness of those attacks.
“We applied to the CGI conference to help,” said Prasad, a fourth-year in molecular genetics. “The attacks in Australia are racially motivated; no money or personal goods are taken.”
Patel is a third-year in economics and microbiology. As president of the South Asian Student Association, he co-authored a petition to address the attacks.
“We started the petition at OSU, but Harvard and Stanford [students] have signed,” Patel said. “We’ll send [the petition] to Australian Ambassador to the U.S., Mr. Kim Beazley.”
Prasad and Patel were among 1,300 students who attended the initiative. For them, it was an opportunity to publicize the attacks in Australia.
“We got leads and did some networking,” Patel said.
Conference speakers included President Clinton, Michele Norris of NPR, U.S. Surgeon General Regina Benjamin and John Podesta, former White House chief of staff.
Attending the conference exposed Prasad and Patel to a related global problem, human trafficking, an issue they both plan to study further.
“Trafficking is a major problem,” Patel said. “In fact, Toledo, Ohio, is a hub of human trafficking in the U.S.”
That the two issues — attacks on dark-skinned people and human trafficking — are related didn’t occur to the two until the Clinton
Global Initiative. Viral related a speech by Jean Robert Cadet.
“He was a child slave in Haiti where he grew up,” Patel said. “His talk was very inspiring.”
Asked if she would attend the initiative again next year, Prasad didn’t hesitate.
“I’d love to, especially if the university would help us with funding it,” she said. The two OSU participants traveled at their own expenses.
“We select students based on the strength of their Commitments to Action, coupled with other characteristics we care about. We want to make sure we have a good proportion of community colleges … as well as good representation of all 50 states,” said Keisha Senter, director of Clinton Global Initiative University, in an e-mail.
Links:
Petition to stop racial assaults on South Asians in Australia:
www.petitiononline.com/racismno/petition.html
Clinton Global Initiative University: www.clintonglobalinitiative.org/
