©2019 The William Davidson Institute 3 OUR ROLE To respond to this opportunity and deliver to students a real-world learning experience, WDI developed an innovative virtual exchange program, the MENA-Michigan Initiative for Global Action Through Entrepreneurship program—M²GATE for short. The program was supported by the Stevens Initiative, an international effort to build global competence and career readiness for young people in the United States and in the Middle East and North Africa while growing and enhancing the field of virtual exchange. The Initiative was created to honor the late Ambassador Chris Stevens, who dedicated his career to building bridges of dialogue and understanding between cultures. The Stevens Initiative is sponsored by the U.S. Department of State and administered by the Aspen Institute. The Stevens Initiative is also supported by the Bezos Family Foundation and the governments of Morocco and the United Arab Emirates. WDI designed the program to combine synchronous virtual connection with custom-developed online learning modules. WDI recruited students from the three campuses of the University of Michigan, along with those at Eastern Michigan University and Wayne State University, to team up with their peers from Egypt, Libya, Morocco and Tunisia. WDI and its partner institutions developed a broad outreach campaign to attract undergraduate students from diverse disciplines and backgrounds. The campaign included social media marketing, email notifications, flyers, open houses on campus and direct outreach to professors to enlist their support in spreading the word. This successful campaign attracted over 1,300 student applicants. A total of 402 students completed the eight-week program—including 274 from the MENA region. The students selected for the program were given their assignment: design business concepts that would tackle social problems such as healthcare, the environment or education. Entrepreneurship was the program’s focus because WDI believes it is an important driver of economic growth—critical for addressing unemployment in many countries—and an effective way to solve social issues. The program empowered students to identify pressing challenges in the MENA region and then develop a social enterprise solution to address them. Students in Egypt greet their U.S. teammates at U-M. OUR ROLE “Connecting students across cultures to tackle social problems together has created so many positive outcomes— enhanced 21st century skills for participants, meaningful new relationships across countries, and many innovative social enterprise ideas that can now be parlayed into full-fledged ventures. It has been a joy to work on this project.” —WDI Vice President for Education Amy Gillett (below)