Coaching Winning Model United Nations Teams: A Teacher's Guide

11. How Students Can Help Your Team Outside the Conference

99 When you’re not actually researching, practicing, or performing, there are a host of other tasks you can take on that will help everyone. There are some tasks that an individual member of the team can take care of for everyone on the team. For example, not everyone needs to visit the same website to look up a particular topic—one check by one person for everyone will do. With that in mind, here are some individual tasks for which students can volunteer, many of which can be performed even before you have country and topic assignments: • Supplies: One student can make sure everyone brings their briefing books, position papers, lapel pins, and everything else to school on the day of a conference. You’ll be using them from Hour One. • Getting letterhead printed with your adoptive country’s name and flag (skip including your school’s name—you don’t want to remind other schools’ students that you’re ultimately their competition). You’ll be amazed how much scrap paper you go through in sending notes to other delegations. Might as well have good-looking paper! • Finding e-mail addresses of other delegates to a conference you’ll attend. You’ll want to “do your homework,” which in terms of politicking at meetings, means knowing others’ positions, how they will behave, and who will support you before you even walk into the room. (Talking to them before the conference does this for you.) • Being the rainmaker: The fund-raising leader who organizes the car washes, contacts potential corporate sponsors, schedules presentations to the Boosters and PTSA, etc. • Obtaining team/country/gavel lapel pins. (These are usually a dollar or so in bulk and are little details that help create the character you’re portraying.) • Contacting the embassy/consulate, UN mission, foreign ministry, or website of your adoptive government. It would be a fine idea if you could 11 How Students Can Help Your Team Outside the Conference visit the embassy/mission of the country you’re portraying. You’ll want to contact the political counselor, public affairs counselor, or sometimes—for the smaller embassies/missions—the Ambassador. • Contacting the appropriate U.S. Department of State desk officer. Try the International Organizations bureau as well as the specific country desk. The State Department’s website also has material of use to MUNers. If you’re visiting Washington, D.C., try to get an appointment to talk to the State officers. • Contacting the UN Information Center, 1775 K Street, NW, Suite 400, Washington, D.C. 20006, 202-331-8670. The Center is the only official UN information center in the United States. Its library contains stacks of printed materials, including copies of UN resolutions and UN Charters (every delegate should have their own well-thumbed copy). You will also find liaison offices for the UN Development Program, UN Environmental Program, and International Fund for Agriculture. • Checking out information on your country(ies) in the CIA’s World Factbook (http://www.cia.gov) and the U.S. Department of State’s country profiles on http://www.state.gov. One person can write the introductory paragraph on your country, which each of your students can use in their introductions for their committee-specific position papers. • Getting UN Charters from UNA-USA, the UN depository libraries, or other sources. • Creating the rules cheat sheet. (This is an easy-to-use graphic organizer of the main rules of the conference. It’s usually found in a plastic sheet protector. Novices should carry one at all times during their first conference, just so everyone will know how to use it.) • Getting a desk-size country flag (these are about 4x6 inches) to establish your presence in the conference room. • Creating business cards (this is really helpful when you’re at a hotel conference, and you want other delegations to be able to contact you. Just write your room extension on the card that already has “Delegation of ________ to the _______ MUN, Committee Name, your name” printed on it. (Again, skip the school identifiers.) If any student has computer graphics skills, there’s a simple business card program that will do this; all you provide is the paper stock. • Splitting up research on the committee topics. For example, one person in the country delegation handling World Health Organization matters 100 Coaching Winning Model UN Teams could research malaria; the other could be the...