A look into our past, present and future!
This month we look back to the turn of the millennium. Simon Moss was on his exchange in Germany when the year 2000 ticked over. Since his exchange he has stayed very busy and nowadays he is the Co-founder and Managing Director of 'Global Citizen' in New York, raising awareness and money for a range of social justice issues. 2020 has therefore been a busy year for him.
How did the SAGSE exchange experience influence your life journey and career path since then?
I’d never been on a plane before going to Germany. My 10 weeks there didn’t just massively improve my German (which it did), it changed my sense of
the world. Learning about Germany’s history, culture and people introduced me to the expansiveness of the human experience, but also the common
threads that tie us all together. As I learnt more about the world, and especially about global challenges like poverty, climate change and pandemics,
the exchange experience grounded my sense of global citizenship, which a decade later resulted in me co-founding Global Citizen as an organization.
A decade on from that, we have campaigned to secure USD$50b in commitments to fight poverty, improve global health and protect the planet. Most recently,
we secured USD$6.9b in commitments to fight COVID-19, including a €383m commitment from Chancellor Merkel (https://youtu.be/xSDVqG1IFe4).
And, I’m pleased that my exchange experience has left me with good enough German to try and do work meetings in German before my long-suffering team
in Berlin tell me to stop and switch back to English.