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Carol Bellamy Essay Featured in Mike Wallace Book

BRATTLEBORO, VT (April 10, 2008) -- A new book edited by veteran TV journalist Mike Wallace, "The Way We Will Be 50 Years from Today: 60 of the World's Greatest Minds Share Their Visions of the Next Half-Century," features an essay by World Learning President and CEO Carol Bellamy.

The book poses to 60 of the world's leading scientists, writers, artists, business and civic leaders the question, "What will life be like 50 years from now?" The collective responses offer a window on our possible futures and an intriguing perspective on the hopes, aspirations, fears, and concerns of our times.

Carol Bellamy's essay, entitled "The Age of the Global Citizen," presents a vision of hope for a world in which people take a global view of social problems and act as engaged global citizens to make the world more peaceful and prosperous for all.

Other contributors include:

• Vint Cerf, Vice President of Google; known as a "Father of the Internet"
• Francis S. Collins, M.D., Ph.D., a geneticist who led the Human Genome Project
• Dr. Wanda Jones, Director of the Office on Women's Health at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
• Ray Kurzweil, an inventor whose developments include the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind and the first text-to-speech synthesizer
• Kim Dae-jung, the former President of the Republic of Korea
• Norman Borlaug, Nobel Peace Prize winner; called "the father of the Green Revolution"
• Craig Newmark, Internet pioneer and founder of craigslist

"The Way We Will Be" can be purchased at your local independent bookstore or online at Powells Books or Amazon.

Below is the full text of Ms. Bellamy's essay as it appears in the book.

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The Age of the Global Citizen
By Carol Bellamy

In my ten years at UNICEF I witnessed, again and again, the dire consequences of failing to protect the most innocent and vulnerable. For me, it is always the individual stories of deprivation and the faces of young victims that I remember most and where I locate both my outrage and my hope.

When I look at the gap between rich and poor nations, the exploitation of children as sex slaves or child soldiers, or widespread war and genocide, I see in those issues not the inevitability of suffering but a crisis of leadership and a failure to make necessary choices. In my years of service with the United Nations, I verified over and over again that poverty doesn't persist because of nothing; war doesn't emerge from nowhere; HIV/AIDS doesn't spread in ways we don't understand.  These are our choices and, for the most part, we've not chosen well. We need to shape a generation of compassionate new leaders who will take the action needed and make the hard choices today's leaders have too often chosen to defer.

How might we do this? The answer may start with a very simple notion -- sending young people abroad to learn about themselves, the world, and their place in it.

At World Learning, the organization I now lead, we send 3,000 young ambassadors abroad each year to walk across differences and see the world through the eyes of others. When I meet the young leaders who emerge transformed from these and similar programs, with new skills and new capacities to understand and with a heartfelt desire to give back to those less fortunate, I am strongly encouraged and filled with hope for the future.

These young leaders include college students like Sara Franklin, who returned recently from our study abroad program in South Africa and wrote of her experience there: "I can say with absolute certainty that I have been permanently altered by what I have seen, the people I have met, and the reflections which have resulted from my time here. My belief that people must band together to fight for one another, that kindness and a commitment to prioritizing those in need, has come to color every conversation I have and every fleeting thought of what I may do with the rest of my life."

My vision for a new era of leadership -- an era that might come to be called the "Age of the Global Citizen" -- begins, modestly, with sending more young people like Sara abroad each year to connect across cultures and religions, share homes and meals, and realize our common humanity. In this vision, by 2058 every young person would make this journey, whether across continents, national borders or ethnic divides. Success would be measured not in miles covered, but in degrees of enlightenment achieved. It would become a global rite of passage.

The global citizens touched by these experiences will share a set of critical leadership qualities now in far too short supply:

• They will be more likely to see diversity as enriching, not threatening;
• They will understand the intimate connection between local acts and global impacts;
• They will feel compassion and responsibility for those outside their tribes, religions, political parties, and borders;
• They will be as tolerant of other views as they are intolerant of human suffering wherever it occurs;
• They will excel at listening and be masters of understanding.

"In the Age of the Global Citizen," historians of the future will reflect, "leaders were less likely to look the other way in the face of injustice. They were more inclined to put a face on the faceless, and give voice to the voiceless. They did not hesitate to act boldly and compassionately when innocent lives were at stake."

This is the world as I'd like it to be in 50 years. This is a world I'd be proud to call "home."