At YCIS, opportunities for students to instigate change extend far beyond the school grounds. YCIS students are raised with a truly international mindset and a global outlook, and this impacts not only their schoolwork but also their approach to life in general.

YCIS Pudong’s hugely successful Global Initiatives Network (GIN) is a service-oriented Co-Curricular Activity (CCA) that gives participating students the chance to meet and discuss issues that affect them and to develop an awareness of how these issues fit into a wider global context. GIN CCA students meet on a weekly basis and discuss campaign projects, meet with students from other schools to share ideas, and attend local and international GIN conferences throughout the academic year.

Last year, YCIS Pudong Secondary students participating in the GIN CCA introduced an initiative to reduce the use of single-use plastics in school. This extended far beyond the GIN CCA group and was adopted not only at the school’s Century Park Campus but also at the Regency Park Campus, making it a truly school-wide initiative. Students, teachers, parents, and other staff were all encouraged to think about how damaging and unnecessary single-use items could be for the local and global environments. The initiative is still being implemented to this day under the guidance of the Environmental Awareness Committee.

In September, the Secondary students attended a GIN conference in Shanghai – the 'One Voice Summit' – where they met their GIN peers from other schools and ran workshops in which they presented and discussed the differences they were making with their respective projects. The conference was great motivation for the YCIS students who have now shifted their focus to a new initiative, where they are concentrating on the theme of ‘Conflict and Peace’.

Upon their return to school, the students participated in the ‘Global Perspectives (GP) Week’ on campus. Students from Year 11 presented their GP team projects to the Year 10 GP teams. Peer-to-peer sharing can be an immensely valuable way of promoting the ideas of community, shared responsibility, as well as giving the younger students the opportunity to see how their older schoolmates are developing as future thought-leaders.

CCAs such as GIN give YCIS students the chance to see the real-life impact of their efforts to make a difference in the world around them. For more information on the wide range of Co-Curricular Activities available at YCIS Shanghai, please click here.