Spotlight on Active Global Citizen and AFS Global Conference Speaker: Sahara Lake

Sahara Lake has dedicated her career to helping young people advocate for themselves, and supplying them with the right tools to do so. At DoSomething, she is the resident expert in empowering young people and advocating to create social change. As a project manager, Sahara leads the marketing and product teams at DoSomething to design online campaigns for offline action. She is also an account manager who communicates with sponsors to ensure deadlines and deliverables are met. “But the most exciting part of my job is designing campaigns with young people and impact at the center,” concludes Sahara.

How does your work help, support or benefit global citizens?

While DoSomething mostly focuses on students in the US, young people all over the world participate in our campaigns. But importantly, the issues we cover are global issues, and we always aim to not only educate and create awareness around global issues, but make tackling these problems actionable. For example our members love our campaigns addressing climate change, which is a world-wide issue.

How does your work address the UN Sustainable Development Goals?

We have/have had campaigns that respond to the majority of the UN Sustainable Development Goals. My personal causes are education, mental health, and bullying.

For example, The (Don’t) Read This Book campaign just closed, and its purpose was to combat the “summer slide”—which is the loss of literacy skills for students in the summer months, particularly in underserved communities. So, we did some research and found that public libraries are shown to combat summer slide, due to their summer programming and having a lot of different options for readers. Our members donated books to their local libraries. Plus, to help with their own literacy skills, they had to include a “warning bookmark” that said why you “shouldn’t” read this book. For example, for Harry Potter, you could write something like: (DON’T) Read This Book…if you’re a fan of magic, wizards, or epic adventure. This book might capture your imagination, and you might never be able to put it down.

Our members across the U.S. donated a total of 22,752 within 2 months.

What benefits of global competence have you seen in your life and work?

Global competence is our business! We work every day to activate our 5MM+ members through a relevant and surround-sound cause marketing activation that drives real, sustained impact.

We have countless examples of young people that come to us via scholarship channels or because of a post they saw on social media, but then stay members because they are interested in our work and so proud of the impact they are making. We are improving their leadership skills and changing their values.

Why would you recommend to others to attend the AFS Global Conference?

I always welcome the opportunity to meet with like-minded individuals and learn best practices from other similar organizations, and talk about our work and how we can continue to empower the next generation to be social changemakers. I recommend others come to do the same!

Connect and network with Sahara as well as other Active Global Citizens and leading 21st century education stakeholders at the AFS Global Conference: Active Global Citizenship—and How to Educate for It, 9-11 October in Montreal.   

Register for the AFS Global Conference