Many students within the JBS community have participated in the Model United Nations program, whether it be with the middle school program, SLAMUN, or THIMUN. If as a participant, you ever found a session particularly inspiring, or thought that your resolution could translate well to real world scenarios, Mr. Newman, Burroughs’ photographer and a sponsor of THIMUN, might just have a solution for you.

During his sabbatical next year, Newman plans on visiting multiple Model UN conferences held across the world, including locations such as Cairo, Berlin, Moscow, and Kyoto. He plans to photograph and document these various conferences in hopes of putting together a portfolio to be featured in the photo exhibition of the UN in New York.

What excites Newman most is the growing interest of the UN in the voice of the youth. Agencies such as the UN ODC, UNICEF, and UN DPI are paying attention to the ideas of students, with the UN ODC even implementing several ideas from a student resolution into an actual operative clause. With that in mind, Newman hopes to act as a consultant for the UN of sorts, reporting back to several UN agencies regarding these conferences, learning about and advocating for student projects, as well as educating and sharing information throughout the Model UN network.

In particular, he looks forward to working with MUN Impact, an organization that tracks the impact that MUN students have outside of the conference — their programs, initiatives, and projects — and seeing how they’re tied into the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (including Clean Water and Sanitation, Quality Education, and Zero Hunger) that the UN aims to achieve by 2030.

Through MUN Impact, Newman hopes to empower students and help them transform ideas contained within their resolutions into tangible projects. He’s excited to be collaborating with so many passionate students who care about their impact on society, as he said the most successful projects “come from when someone is so passionate about an idea that they just can’t live without doing something about it.”

However, apart from visiting any model UN conferences, Newman plans to begin his sabbatical by documenting an issue that he has taken a personal interest in: the Great Garbage Patch.

Roughly three time the size of Texas, the Great Garbage Patch is a gigantic body of plastic floating in the Pacific.

For twenty days, Newman will be traveling aboard the Sea Dragon, a sailing vessel operated exclusively by women. The Sea Dragon is working with several groups based in the Netherlands, including a research group that studies microplastics, and 4Ocean, a company that sells bracelets made from litter in the ocean. Newman also plans to connect with an operation that will deploy a new technology that hopes to reduce the size of the garbage patch by half within five years.

Newman promises to document his adventures and bring back a sample of plastic to JBS for the students to study. Eagerly looking forward to the trip, he said, “I think it’s going to really motivate me, and it’ll be incredibly inspiring.”