Fighting world hunger, one student leader at a time
Thanks to the first annual New York Youth Institute, held Sept. 19 by Cornell’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences’ International Programs and the World Food Prize, a high school student in the New Visions in Life Sciences program at Cornell and her mentor at Cornell, Michele Sutton, have just returned the Global Youth Institute, Oct. 15-17, in Des Moines, Iowa, where they hobnobbed with Nobel and World Food Prize laureates and more than 600 global leaders from 65 countries.
The event was the World Food Prize’s annual international symposium. Zoe Anderson, a senior at Trumansburg High School, was selected from 26 high school students that attended the New York Youth Institute, which was designed to develop student leaders in the global fight against hunger.
At the Global Youth Institute, Anderson served as one of 120 delegates (and one of four from New York) from around the world and with Sutton, attended the World Food Prize Award ceremony, the Borlaug Dialogue and listened to Bill Gates deliver his first major address on agriculture and announce $120 million in grants to help the world’s poorest farmers.
“This was a life-changing experience [for Anderson],” said Sutton, “a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for a high school student to share her own ideas about such complex issues with those leaders in a position to solve them. I think Zoe has returned inspired to change the world. … If it weren’t for Cornell, Francine Jasper [who organized the New York Youth Institute] and her International programs department, it wouldn’t have happened.”
- Susan S. Lang