Global Ties National Meeting 2024

Heidi Knuff, SDDC’s Executive Director, Adrianna Borja, SDDC Program Manager, and Susan Flieder, SDDC Board Member attended Diplomacy in Action: Raising Community Voices, the 2024 Global Ties U.S. (GTUS) National Meeting in Washington D.C. on March 5-8, 2024!

Networking

This was Heidi’s fourth and Adrianna and Susan’s first GTUS National Meeting. The benefits of attendance for Heidi, Adrianna, and Susan were significant and we are very grateful to GTUS for convening such a useful program. The most beneficial aspect of the conference was networking. The importance of this meeting for creating new connections and strengthening existing connections cannot be overstated. We strengthened connections with many old and new Community Based Member (CBM) partners and shared challenges, best practices, and new ideas. We discussed new program opportunities with National Programming Agencies (NPAs), and network-wide challenges and successes with Global Ties staff and OIV representatives.

Learning

The National Meeting provided valuable training opportunities through plenaries and sessions. As a newer Executive Director, Heidi benefited from attending sessions that focused on strategic planning and supporting and protecting your team from burnout. Adrianna benefited from sessions geared toward best practices for IVLP programmers and developing your team’s organizational culture. Adrianna and Heidi shared their takeaways with our staff so that the entire team benefited from our visit to the National Meeting. Heidi’s takeaways helped inform the Strategic Planning process that we are currently undergoing as an organization. Adrianna’s takeaways have informed the program team on helpful tips in writing successful IVLP proposals, and organizing IVLP program materials virtually for participants to easily access. Susan gained a much greater understanding of the critical role that the IVLP plays with respect to the State Department’s citizen diplomacy efforts, and really enjoyed hearing stories of how this program has led to impressive results around the world. Susan highly recommends that all board members attend this conference, when possible.

Advocating

At this year’s National Meeting, we visited with six of our California elected officials during Advocacy Day. Our visits to the offices of Senator Butler and Senator Padilla were done in collaboration with Global Ties San Francisco, Global Ties Sacramento, and ICDLA, strengthening our relationships with the other CBMs in our state. We also visited four of our five San
Diego congress peoples’ offices to thank them for their past support and advocate for future support including Congresswoman Jacobs, Congressman Levin, Congressman Peters, and Congressman Issa. 

The evening receptions were also wonderful. Heidi attended the reception at the Estonian Embassy where she learned tons about Estonia and now desperately wants to travel there and tell everyone about it! Adrianna’s favorite evening event was the visit to the National Museum of American Diplomacy. At the event Adrianna had the opportunity to engage with leadership at other CBMs to discuss our IVLP best practices, including sharing SDDC’s successful network of hotel resources. Furthermore, we use simulations created by the National Museum of American Diplomacy as a keystone for our ‘SDDC Binational Youth Summit’, where we brought together a hundred students from both Tijuana, Mexico and San Diego to share the importance of Diplomacy with real world scenarios. Another one of Adrianna’s favorite events was the Department of State Reception, where Adrianna connected with Public Diplomacy diplomats to further discuss the importance of our work at GTUS.

Looking Ahead

We are grateful to GTUS and DoS for allocating significant resources to support a National Meeting and to support CBM travel to make participation in this program possible. This event is the most important professional development opportunity available to our staff. It is also an important source of inspiration. When we find ourselves face-to-face with our peers, sharing our struggles and successes, we leave reenergized and recommitted to this important work. We are so grateful to this incredible network and our fearless leaders at Global Ties U.S. and DoS. We are already looking forward to next year’s program!