ABOUT THE MILLENNIUM FELLOWSHIP - CLASS OF 2022
United Nations Academic Impact and MCN are proud to partner on the Millennium Fellowship. Over 31,000 young leaders on 2,400+ campuses across 140+ nations applied to join the Class of 2022. 200+ campuses worldwide (just 8%) were selected to host the 3,000+ Millennium Fellows.
UNITED NATIONS ACADEMIC IMPACT AND MCN PROUDLY PRESENT SUSAN YANET PILA THAQUIMA, A MILLENNIUM FELLOW FOR THE CLASS OF 2022.
Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú | Lima, Peru | Advancing SDG 17 & UNAI 7
" Being part of the Millennium Fellowship means not only a challenge but one of my greatest opportunities to grow as a professional and as a person. I am excited to do collaborative work where I can apply my ideas and initiatives, as well as meet and learn from more leaders. Likewise, I am happy because being a Millennium Fellow implies having the support of an prestigious organization like the UN to carry out projects with social impact since the university. Honestly, I can't wait to see the learning that I will achieve after this experience. "
Millennium Fellowship Project: Más que votantes
We are building a social platform called "More than voters" which aims to transform civic participation into a daily activity in young people's life. In Lima, Peru the levels of civic participation of young adults at a local level are very low (Nájar, Cano y Quiroz, 2017). 81.5% of Peruvians report that they don’t trust their authorities and 66.1% think their municipal management is “terrible” (National Institute of Statistics and Informatics, 2020). Civic participation only comes to mind in mediatic events like protests and elections, but in day-to-day activities it feels complex, time-consuming, and exclusive to people with “political” interests. That’s why, “More than Voters”, has two main purposes, to strengthen social accountability and increase citizens' perception of inclusion in local policies. To achieve this, there are three main strategies, make civic participation intuitive (easy to do), entertaining (attractive to do) and communitary (share by one and others). This focus has impacted the design, functions and interactions in the social platform. For example, in the "Feed'' section users could see posts about their local events, social issues and comments from their "neighbors' ' and "local authorities' ' (similar to well-known apps such as Facebook or Linkedin). The platform is divided into four main sections. The first one is "Connections" where users will have the possibility to learn and connect with social organizations and local parties. They can know about their main activities and actions of social impact, with the chance of joining them. The second one is "Participation" where users will recognize, learn and intervene in social issues by interacting with a live map of their district. The issues here will be categorized and each one will have a main page where users can propose solutions or join together to make a complaint to their local town halls. The third one is "Transparency" where simple and clean graphics will show the personal information of their local authorities, the Balance of Trimestral payments and their Local Plan of Development. The fourth one is "Events", where local events show up to the users for them to participate in them. Finally there is the "Experiences" section where testimonies, galleries and documents from the past events will show up.
About the Millennium Fellow
Susan Pila Thaquima is a competent, unique and persistent young Law student from the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Peru. She was born in a small city in Cusco, Peru and despite the fact that her economic context played against her, she knew how to exploit her academic and leadership skills to win scholarships since a very young age to access to the best education in her country. Due to her own origin, she is very aware of the problems of society, especially educational inequality and discrimination. That is why she fights every day to become a future agent of change. In the meantime, she devises projects involving culture, history and narrative to support her initiatives. Susan really hopes that one day she can pull off a large-scale, life-changing project in contribution to the sustainable goals of the United Nations.