27 Mar
Awareness and Advocacy, Global Citizenship Insights, Global Solvers Accelerator Projects, News, Senior Fellow Initiatives

Scaling Deep: A Systems Approach to Social Impact Leadership

In today’s rapidly evolving world, leadership in the social impact space is undergoing a profound transformation. A 2017 study by FSG and the Collective Impact Forum found that over 80% of successful social change efforts involve cross-sector collaboration and shared leadership structures. Moreover, systems thinking, empathy, and the ability to work across differences are emerging as the most critical competencies for 21st-century changemakers. In this reality, leadership is no longer about commanding from the front; it's about asking better questions, facilitating dialogue, and enabling sustainable, community-led transformation.Peter Mukuka, Founder and CEO of Men of Honour, embodies this shift. His organization...

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22 Mar
Awareness and Advocacy, Global Citizenship Insights, Global Citizenship Learning Program, News

Leadership Beyond the Spotlight: Cultivating Global Citizens for Lasting Change

In conversations about leadership, the focus often falls on bold decision-making, visible impact, and large-scale transformation. But real leadership, the leadership that creates lasting change is often much quieter. It’s found in small actions, in empowering others, and in recognizing that change is not always about taking charge but about stepping back when necessary.Research increasingly supports this shift in perspective. A 2023 McKinsey & Company report on leadership effectiveness found that the most successful leaders in complex, uncertain environments were those who fostered psychological safety, encouraged team autonomy, and focused on collaborative problem-solving rather than command-and-control approaches.For Sophia Kaleta, a...

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26 Mar
Awareness and Advocacy, News

Confronting Discrimination: What can people and organizations do to make a difference?

Joining us as panelists were two seasoned individuals from different walks of life but with a common goal of putting a definitive end to discrimination. Kelli McLoud-Schingen, President of KMS Intercultural Consulting, is a Global Diversity and Inclusion Specialist with over 30 years of experience in the Diversity and Intercultural Fields. Our second panelist, Manju Patel-Nair ‘set up ChangeMakers UnLtd to deliver training and international consultancy, focusing on racial justice, community cohesion, global citizenship, and development education.The Melton Foundation values the uniqueness of every person. Our diverse backgrounds enrich our communities and expand our perspectives. We condemn all forms of...

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16 Mar
Awareness and Advocacy, News

Grateful to be a Woman – International Women’s Day 2021

“I wish the world was equal. I wish the world was fair. I wish we did not have to celebrate days like today with such zest and fanfare.I wish we tried instead to really challenge our core.I wish we had the strength to confront this status more.I wish there were no words such as a he or a she. I wish the world would just let people be.”shared Melton Fellow and our Townhall moderator Meeta Gangrade. As a woman, Meeta always sought to challenge the status quo. She persistently aimed to be the strong voice in organizations she worked in, which were...

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16 Mar
Awareness and Advocacy, News

Unity in Diversity: An Open Mic

For as long as we can remember, art has been a form of communication. It keeps cultures alive, showcasing diversity in all its beauty and often acting as a bridge from one culture to another. It is a therapeutic medium of self-expression, a celebration of an idea,  solidarity in support of a movement amongst many other uses. The flagship Melton Foundation Open Mic, organized as part of the Melton Foundation's Virtual Global Citizenship Week 2021, offered a platform for talented artists to showcase their art in any of its various forms as we celebrated Global Citizenship, and more importantly, the...

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15 Mar
Awareness and Advocacy, News

White Paper: State of Global Citizenship

‘State of Global Citizenship’ - A White Paper, where practitioners and experts from the field discuss, debate, analyze, and evaluate Global Citizenship from multiple stands and multiple perspectives, to create a fresh, wholesome narrative.The world today is in flux. It has dynamic streams of activities interwoven with each other, facilitating exchange and mixing of populations, ideas, cultures, technologies, and innovations. It is against this backdrop that we view Global Citizenship - a concept that goes beyond cultures and boundaries. Global Citizenship connotes a oneness that does not recognize the geographical or cultural divisions of humanity. It connotes an underlying current...

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10 Feb
Awareness and Advocacy, News

Think Global, Act Local!

Taking global citizenship to local heartlands is achievable through signaling by the right set of actors. By introducing role models who reflect and understand local aspirations and needs, we unearth a linkage which establishes a communicable bridge between the role models and the local inhabitants, thereby serving as a vehicle for the dispersal of global values. One of the indicators of becoming a global citizen is the recognition and removal of one’s ‘tunnel vision’. Global exposure and intercultural immersion expand a person’s ability to acknowledge and understand multiple points of view, some of which may fundamentally differ from their own. This...

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04 Nov
Awareness and Advocacy, News

Embracing uncertainty and mental health in a world influx

The session kicked off by addressing the elephant in the room. The participants were asked to enunciate the meaning of uncertainty. In response, the majority of them agreed that uncertainty is all about questions, questions, and questions. Uncertainty places before us a variety of mysterious queries and breeds restlessness within us when we find ourselves struggling to answer them. Dr. V duly noted that one of the ways to beat uncertainty was to keep asking questions and most importantly - to keep answering them. Each answer infuses clarity into our foggy vision and eases our mind. Next, the participants were asked to...

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07 Jun
Awareness and Advocacy, News

SexEd4All … or Sex Education For All

What happens when a group diverse group of committed citizens of the world come together and some are passionate about sex education, others about participatory design and others about coding? SexEd4All: a team of Melton Fellows from Chile, Germany and India that develops a culturally sensitive platform for young people to learn and exchange around the topics of puberty, sex and sexuality. This project is the result of deep friendship and a passion to work towards solving a pressing issue.Everything started with an online course on participatory design at MIT D-Lab and a design thinking festival at HPI School of Design...

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23 Feb
Awareness and Advocacy, News

Turning great ideas into tangible solutions together

Coming from different parts of the world and being passionate about the same issue brings people together. That said, it takes quite a bit of effort to really tackle issue beyond discussing it. Among many other things, it entails finding common ground that allows you to implement meaningful action and effectively contribute to the solution of the problem on the ground. The latter is what global citizenship is also about and here are some of our experience about what it takes to effectively work together, across divides, to turn great ideas into tangible solutions that benefit local communities across the world. At...

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08 Dec
Awareness and Advocacy, News

Participatory Design: A Creative, Non-linear And Sometimes Messy Process

written by May Garces, Pedro Poblete Lasserre, Neli Blum and Juli MaierParticipatory Design is a creative, abstract, non-linear and sometimes messy process that, when well applied, can lead to sustainable, community based outcomes. This is what we, four Melton Fellows from Chile and Germany, experienced during the six-week online course Introduction to Participatory Design for Development by MIT D-Lab.The course introduced us to the MIT D-Lab Framework of Participatory Design which consists of six stages, starting with the identification of an opportunity, through the development and refinement of the solution and ending with the transition to implementation. At the beginning...

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07 Nov
Awareness and Advocacy, News

Learn, Implement, Experiment – That is the motto engineers live by!

written by Ranjini Roa HSParticipating in the Asia-Pacific Student Entrepreneurship Society Summit (ASES) 2017 at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, China  was a very holistic experience. It served as a platform to meet people who are very passionate about entrepreneurship; it was platter filled with a diverse set of ideas seasoned with quirkiness and creativity. Who would have thought that something as simple as biking could be connected to raising funds for an NGO or something as smart as giving an opportunity to a traveler to be your personal shopper!My visit to China was full of surprises, insights and collaborations, and because the diverse...

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