The Model United Nations (MUN) lunch club is relatively new to ASL, as it was only introduced in the beginning of the year, but has turned into more than a lunch club due to a school trip to Spain for it. Fourteen students from grade six, seven and eight attended the MADMUN conference (Madrid Model United Nations) from April 8 to 10.
The United Nations, which is what the MUN is based on, has a few simple goals: maintaining worldwide peace and security, developing relations among nations and fostering cooperation between nations in order to solve economic, social, cultural, or humanitarian international problems. These goals help to invoke change all over the world, and the MUN works to discuss and debate these worldwide issues.
Those who participated in the MUN took a trip to Madrid to take part in a conference for MUNs from a variety of schools all over the world. The groups met together to discuss issues that affected people in all places of the world and come up with solutions to specific problems. This is generally what a MUN meeting works to achieve, but in this conference, it was on a much larger scale. There were many schools from all across the globe that participated in this conference, working to discuss issues and topics that are important.
All of the middle school students who attended were a part of the trip delegates to this conference, and each delegate had their own topic to discuss with groups from other schools.
Some topics were the issues of Palestine and Israel, supervising government spy agencies, and how to help countries facing the aftermath of certain events. Seventh-grade delegate Noah Ryang said, “The trip helped us work collaboratively with other delegates, find innovative solutions to problems, and it brought out lots of skills in us like working together, sticking up for what we believe in and being assertive, and also just speaking from a different point of view.”
Overall the first ever global MUN meeting ASL middle schoolers took part in was a success and where students were able to use all of their skills practiced during the lunch club on a much greater scale.
