Profiles in Compassion - Yumi Kuwana's Global Endeavor

For this next article in our Profiles in Compassion series, we reached beyond the borders of Westport to Greenwich. While the program mentioned below was born there, it is offered to high school students throughout Fairfield County.

Yumi Mera Kuwana, Founding Principal of Greenwich financial advisory firm Cook Pine Capital LLC, has spearheaded an ambitious new program to foster global learning for kids ages 15 to 18. The Global Citizens Summit For Youth (GCSY) will run from August 2 - 9 at the Harvard Faculty Club in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Kuwana, a Greenwich resident and mom of three, drew upon her own experience growing up in both the U.S. and Japan in creating the program.

Kuwana explained the premise behind GCSY during a chat at Cook Pine Capital's offices. "Growing up, I learned to acculturate rather than assimilate," she said. "Teens want to fit in, and often times by doing that they dispose of their own native cultures. Acculturation gives them the best of both worlds." The program will take 24 students from the U.S. and around the globe and will introduce them to an array of noted educators and thought leaders. "The criteria for admission are that the students must speak English and another language and have grown up in two or more cultures," Kuwana said.

Kuwana, an alumna of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard Business School, consulted many of her mentors in the process of forming the program. "We will have three veteran educators from Phillips Exeter Academy leading the program," she said. GCSY will employ Exeter's renowned Harkness method of learning, which stresses both individual accountability and group collaboration in the education process. "The themes we will address will be Fairness and Freedom, and we will have an "Inspirations Evening." All of the curricula will be discussion-based, and will be geared to kids from all walks of life, a point which Kuwana emphasized.

"My husband and I started Cook Pine Capital and its consulting offshoot, Cook Pine Advisors, to serve high net worth individuals and families," she said. "However, I didn't want GCSY to just be aimed at kids from families of means but to everyone." Kuwana said that even though the program is in its infancy, her 10-year goal is to create a standardized global curriculum.

"We need balanced learning, integrating both online and offline methods," she said. "Online learning does democratize the educational process, but person to person contact is so important - the human component. That's the aim of GCSY."

Click here to apply for the program and obtain for more information. Full tuition for GCSY is $5,000, but need-based scholarships are available for applicants. The first deadline for applications is Saturday, March 1. The second is Saturday, March 22.