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What is the new Global Discussion Club?



On April 25th, the newly founded Global Discussion Club will be hosting their first event with the Colombian Ambassador to Spain to talk over the Colombian peace and disarmament processes and its challenges for the future. Despite the relative redundancy that a normal IE student might feel whilst looking at such announcements, The Stork would like to shed some light on what makes this new Club special.

Founded by three 1st years from the B.B.A/B.I.R Segovia class, Enrique Araque, Luis J. Martinez and Lucia Minguez Fernandez, the Global Discussion Club aims to bring a unique and diverse set of speakers to IE students through their partnership with the Valsaín Foundation.

“The idea is to feature speakers for I.R. and B.B.A. students. We will start with Colombian ambassador to Spain, then continue with the General of the Spanish Statistical Institute, CEOs from companies,” explains Luis Martinez, “Only one single event for this year but we will be bringing more next year. We’ve been told by Clint to go ahead as we believe it will be successful. The idea is to bring someone who is current to the ongoing world affairs.”

“Oh, it’s just another speaker club,” you might think. Well, not really.

The ultimate advantage of the Global Discussion Club is its connection to the Valsaín Foundation. The organization was founded in 2008, by the former Spanish Ombudsman and a European Commissioner, to foster “the values on which democracy is based, through study, formulation, teaching and implementing proposals and initiatives of all kind that are meant to foster the knowledge and extension of these values and to prevent human rights violations as well as authoritarian, racist and xenophobes temptations.”

To accomplish these goals, the Foundation “has not only been doing various activities in a direct way, but it also has built up a European Institute for Mediation and Public Ethics (Instituto Europeo para la Mediación y la Ética Pública, IEMEP) and a European Observatory for the Right of Asylum (Obsertario Europeo para el Derecho de Asilo, OEDA).

As Enrique Araque explains, “its founder has a network of speakers, and through him, we find out who we can invite to IE. The organization provides the access to a multitude of famous and interesting speakers for university students.”

Regarding the Club itself, the founders indicate that it will be running under the premise of any students being able to sign up, with its members being notified about its upcoming speakers.

“There’s no constant activity that you do within the Club besides attending the events,” clarifies Luis.

The Club will feature sign-ups on Campus Online with links to the Foundation’s profiles of the speakers. And prior to the events, Enrique, Luis and Lucia will collect questions attendees might have and classify them to deliver the students a fulfilling experience.

One of the reasons the students decided to establish the Global Discussion Club was that the speaker experience in IE has been frustrating.

“It’s an opportunity for people around the university to attend more conferences about IR. And in many cases, students don’t attend these events because of exams and projects,” explains Luis, “Hence, the club aims to establish a constant source of speakers, which will be relevant to IE students and will be more available.”

Additionally, Lucia and Luis say that the Valsaín Foundation resonates with IE’s values.

“If you look at the foundation’s values, then you can see that they featured within the creation of the European Union, and also are key values of IE. We’d like to provide the students with a huge opportunity to be able to interact with important personalities within the international sphere, both in IR and business,” explain the founders, “In other words, we’re trying to pull IE into the international sphere.”

Within the university, the Club would avoid the internal bureaucracy whilst organizing the speakers. It provides the students with a lot of flexibility, meaning that if something happened in somewhere, then the founder can immediately find a relevant speaker and through the club, create an event at IE University.

The Club also aims to organize collaboration with other clubs to help them pull speakers for their events. Unlike other clubs that look for speakers, GDC’s advantage is that its speakers wouldn’t be paid by IE directly. Instead, they would come representing the Foundation, and wouldn’t be looking to make an extra buck off the students.

On April 25, the Global Discussion Club will host the Colombian Ambassador to Spain at IE’s Madrid Campus. Now that you know more about it, make sure to attend, as the club’s future looks promising!

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