News & Press
Abby Falik Interviewed on NPR’s Inflection Point
2015-11-25
Inflection Point is a public radio show dedicated to telling the stories of women changing the status quo. We’re thrilled to share this week’s podcast featuring Abby Falik, Global Citizen Year’s Founder/CEO. Abby talks with host Lauren Schiller about the crisis facing our outdated education system, and shines a light on a promising solution: a new pathway...
Read MoreYou Should Know: Abby Falik
2015-10-21
A well-known educator and activist, Abby Falik is the founder and CEO of Global Citizen Year, which works to take the concept of a global bridge year after high school and turn it into a more commonly experienced expectation and opportunity. Occupation: Social Entrepreneur Place of birth: Berkeley, CA Instagram/Twitter: @abbyfalik What do you actually...
Read MoreBridge-year program to make a bigger Jewish splash
2015-10-01
by Patricia Corrigan , j. correspondent When Abby Falik graduated from high school in 1997, the Berkeley teen wanted “to do something in the world” — to provide some type of humanitarian service — before heading off to college. But no such program was available. Today there is, and Falik started it. Abby Falik wants...
Read MoreHere’s How to Make a Gap Year Before College Count
2015-06-10
Joe O’Shea is the author of Gap Year: How Delaying College Changes People in Ways the World Needs, President of the Board of the American Gap Association, and Director of Undergraduate Research and Academic Engagement at Florida State University. American students are taking gap years at record numbers. Over the next three months, many high...
Read MoreA Year Off Before College Isn’t A Gap, It’s A Launching Pad
2015-06-10
By Denise Restauri In August 2012, my daughter Ally was in India, spending the first half of her gap year at Shanti Bhavan, a boarding school for the most vulnerable children of India’s “lowest caste.” After five months at Shanti Bhavan, Ally would head off to Nepal to join (then 25-year-old) Maggie Doynewho runs a home...
Read MoreAbby Falik selected as one of the 10 Young Women to Watch for in 2014 (The Story Exchange)
2014-05-20
When Abigail Falik graduated from high school, she dreamed of joining the Peace Corps but got the standard response: “Go to college first.” Frustrated but determined, Falik cobbled together a trip to Nicaragua, where she lived with a family in a rural community and learned to make tortillas by hand. She worked in the fields,...
Read MoreTime Out: The Value Of A Gap Year (Forbes)
2014-04-09
After 13 years, 117 months and approximately 2,350 days of continuous school, Lindsay felt she needed a break. Instead of heading directly for her freshman year at a prestigious upstate New York college, she decided to take a gap year and packed her bags for India. There, she learned Tamil while helping to bring solar...
Read More‘Global Citizen’ Gap Year Program Leads To More Success In College (HuffPost Live)
2014-04-08
For UCLA student Mai Lee, a gap year program between high school and college proved to be instrumental in determining her academic trajectory. “My values have shifted,” she recalled to HuffPost Live’s Jordan Freeman of her year living in a 2,000-person village in Senegal. “My interests have shifted, and during my experience through working through apprenticeships, I realized...
Read More“Give and Go” in Town and Country
2014-03-27
What Global Citizen Year offers requires more than travel. Participants spend a year with a family in a rural area of Africa or Latin America. The program is designed for students as a bridge year between high school and college. Those who are accepted must raise $2,500 from commitments in their own community, and then...
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