Austin High School students ready to add voice to food security efforts

Four Austin students are preparing to add their voice to the global call for food security when they attend the Global Youth Institute at the end of this month.

Austin juniors Chloe Cannon, Makayla Dokpodjo, Sabreen Nagid and Isabella Rosenthal will join a delegation of 11 total students representing Minnesota at the institute, which takes place Oct. 29-Nov. 1 in Des Moines, Iowa.

The institute itself is part of the World Food Prize Conference, which is dedicated to innovations and inspiring action in sustainability and availability of food on the international level.

The Global Youth Institute is focused on involving the youth and putting their efforts toward this same issue.

"I think this whole project is opening their eyes to the fact that food insecurity is not something only in countries in Africa or third world countries," said Austin High School Social Studies teacher Lisa Sanders. "Food insecurity happens all over in our own community and they are the voice of the future. They are going to be the ones to solve this problem."

Austin's four representatives were chosen after having attended the Minnesota Youth Institute at the University of Minnesota and involved the projects each student developed in an effort to answer what is often a very complicated issue.

That complicated aspect was something the students learned quickly when developing their project.

"I feel like, in all honesty, we had no idea of what we were getting ourselves into in the beginning," Dokpodjo said. "It's a project for AP Human Geography, I hope I get an A. I will do the best that I can and it kind of progressed from there. Everything kept rolling from there."

Every student at Austin High School is required to take an AP studies course as sophomores, and the development of this project is a part of that. After that, it was up to the student if they wanted to bring it to the University of Minnesota Youth Institute.

Being given the option to take the project further up the ladder helped solidify the importance of the project for Rosenthal.

"Once I realized we had the opportunity to go to the University of Minnesota, it became more real and then I started preparing it more as something professional," she said.

After starting their projects as sophomores they continued to develop the project through their junior year.

Sanders said that the work of developing the projects is having an effect not only on the students, but the course work she is presenting as well.

"The whole process is kind of reshaping a little bit the human geography class," Sanders said. "It's giving them kind of a way to look at a real world problem and apply the understanding they are gaining and knowledge they are gaining throughout all of our units and applying it to this real world problem."

Each student in the class chose a country to focus on and then narrowed that focus down to a specific issue affecting food security.

Through that focused work, the student developed a solution that might be implemented in remedying the solution and to better open up food availability.

In some cases, the project further connected students to where they come from, which was the case for Nagid who is Sudanese.

"It hit home when my family started talking about it," Nagid said. "I would ask my mom a question and all of a sudden my aunt is calling me. You actually care about it because people feel like when you leave your home country, people forget about it as a whole. When you're actually working on the project and showing interest in me working on it, it actually hit home. I'm doing this for a reason, not just an A in a class."

The Global Youth Institute has become larger than simply trying to find a remedy for an issue. It's proving to be a connector to the wider world for the students and their place in it.

All four came away from the state level institute with more of a sense of just how important their voice could be in the future.

"One thing I pulled away seeing the youth there and seeing all of these different ideas and research -- we're going to be the future," Cannon said. "We're going to be the next people in the government and working that out. We have the chance to communicate more with people, not just in Minnesota but from different countries. We can truly do something about this."

For Sanders, watching the four develop their projects and take them to the next level has been affirming for the work they've put in.

While the students have the opportunity to come away from the Global Youth Institute with scholarships and more, they also have the opportunity to come away with experience that can further carry their own voices forward.

And when they come back, the plan is to develop them as a voice for their peers.

"The plan is once we return, they will come back and share their experience with students here and maybe be mentors to this year's class, as well as the students who worked on it last year."

She also took the opportunity this week to address the students directly on the work they've put in.

"I'm amazingly proud of them," Sanders said. "I can't express how proud of them I am. You guys have grown so much in the past year and hearing you talk about your countries and how you are expressing your ideas, I've seen that growth."

"I just see that this opportunity of going to Global Youth Institute, you're going to continue to grow and blossom more," she continued. "I'm super excited to see what other opportunities and doors open for them."

How Makayla Dokpodjo, Sabreen Nagid, Isabella Rosenthal and Chloe Cannon envision change in their countries

Makayla Dokpodjo

While financially a wealthy country due to oil and petroleum exports, the United Arab Emirates faces an issue in regards to its food production. Eighty percent of their food is imported due to the money coming in from those exports, but it's not likely to be sustainable as countries cut back on oil use. Dokpodjo's idea is to utilize green houses in the desert to further develop what the country can do within its borders.

Sabreen Nagid

Sudan's main issue is the continued warring between factions that want power over the other, rather than combating oil issues and deforestation. Nagid wants to integrate to the two sides through alliance to better approach those issues as they apply to food insecurity.

Isabella Rosenthal

Rosenthal's country is Belize, in Central America, and focuses on the country's greatest agriculture production unit -- bananas. Rosenthal envisions an idea that utilizes banana peels in creating fertilizer that could be used by farmers within Belize to grow their own food and keep it within the country rather than export so much of it.

Chloe Cannon

Cannon's project approaches the poverty levels in the Romanian rural areas and its Romany populations. The plan calls for the development of commercial farming that would raise money for those rural populations by gaining profit off the food they raise. This would be a switch from the subsistence farming those people currently rely on. Those profits in turn could be used to create better transportation and roads