EuroPeyton

Blog Post #3 A little over one week ago, Italians went to the polls to vote for the party they wanted to control their government and lead their country. Among the issues most pressing on voters’ minds were jobs and the economy, as was true in the American and French elections of 2016 and 2017. The value placed on the principle of labor has been deeply embedded into Italian society ever since the inception of the modern republic of Italy. To this day, one can still sense the pride Italians take on reaping the crops of their land and running family owned businesses throughout the peninsula. However, with the dawn of globalization in the 1990s and the Great Recession of 2008, workers in Italy, and across the globe, have struggled to find stable jobs with decent wages. Likewise, governments of countries, such as the United States and Italy, have found it difficult to revitalize their economies. This has resulted in fewer jobs with little growth in wag...

As one can imagine, working in an international environment presents a full dosage of multiculturalism. Just this week I experienced one of the best examples of multiculturalism. At the office I intern with, Oxfam Italia, they are in the process of planning a massive, multinational event called Walk the Global Walk that we will host in May of 2019. This event serves as the culmination of all of the work Oxfam Italia and its partners will be doing throughout the 2018-2019 school year. This work includes training teachers how to teach concepts from the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The three SDGs that we are focusing on deal with human rights, urban safety, and environmental protection in the classroom. Taking it a step further, Oxfam is working with student leaders in school across Europe for them to become ‘peer leaders’ so that they can in turn teach their fellow students these principles which we believe is an even more effective method. At the end of this upc...