Anthony Jewett

The National Center for Global Engagement (formerly The Bardoli Global Initiative) is named after the site of an historic 1937 intercultural exchange between Mahatma Gandhi and the prominent African American leaders who helped to inspire the American civil rights movement. Its mission is to “transform the face of America abroad” by using culturally-relevant marketing strategies in combination with partnerships across multiple sectors in order to drastically increase the number of African American students who go abroad each year to 150,000 by the year 2017. Although American college students live in a society whose economic and social realities increasingly demand intercultural competencies and international exposure, just 2 percent of eligible U.S. undergraduates study abroad each year. While African Americans represent 12 percent of the total U.S. college population, over the past 10 years, they have consistently represented only 3 percent of students participating in education abroad programs.