UPG’s Mission in Action: Creating Local Capacity for Global Impact
By Achon Sabo Danjuma
On a beach along the Maine coast in the USA, 60 young adults gather every year for something special: a week-long sustainable leadership experience, thanks to United People Global (UPG).
For most of them, it’s their first time abroad. For all of them, it’s the beginning of something so much greater.
But UPG’s work does not stop at international visibility. In fact, its only true strength lies in what happens afterward.
“UPG provided me with the tools, but also with the responsibility to return and do something,” states Sara, age 25 from Lebanon. Following Hurricane Island, she led a recycling drive in her hometown and gathered more than 3,000 plastic bottles within a period of three months.
Founded with the vision of enabling people to make a positive impact on the world, UPG focuses on practical empowerment. Their Sustainability Leadership Program trains 500 young leaders a year, not just with knowledge, but with the confidence to lead.
And it works. The numbers are persuasive: more than 14,000 people reached through mini-trainings; 586 certified leaders from over 100 countries; thousands of projects in local communities started by one shared experience.
Yet, beyond the numbers are the lives touched.
There’s Abdul, who took the training and initiated a youth podcast in Nigeria on SDG awareness. And Liza, a college student who activated her entire campus to cut down on single-use plastics. Theirs are UPG’s mission in action: capacity building that ripples outward. “True change is not top-down,” UPG President Yemi Babington-Ashaye says. “It’s person by person, community by community.”
And that is where UPG triumphs: not only in world-wide aspirations, but in grass-roots activism. In each young person who teaches, motivates, and empowers others, their legacy lives on.
To learn more, look up UPG on her official website 🔗 https://unitedpeople.global
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