Engaging as Global Leaders & Advancing Communities Through Humanities Research
Understanding one’s audience is a key task whether addressing your peers in a classroom presentation, potential angel financiers at a business plan content, or investors at a shareholders annual meeting. Connecting with your audience means mining their history and their traditions to better understand what they hold dear. To be successful, your audience’s values, goals, and dreams must be your own. In this UNL in Ghana program, we will research Ghanaian cultural and political history to better understand our clients in Jamestown, Accra. Our reading will be complemented by site visits, lectures, and informal conversations to gauge the accuracy of our conclusions. With this knowledge, we will organize an inaugural community development competition, which would showcase several architectural designs of locals that help rejuvenate key public spaces in Jamestown. Our clients, and our audience, will be Jamestown residents as well as local community designers. This means we must raise our competence in cross-cultural communication to ensure that our collaborative efforts are both productive and ethical. By the end of our partnership with the Jamestown community, we will have exercised our skills as global leaders. We will be more deeply steeped in the practice of learning from, and listening to, our clients.