What is ATAFA?
Making A-TECH’s Foreign Affairs system unified, and congruent with that of college level foreign affairs associations
For a long time, there’s been a quiet problem with the foreign affairs organizations at A-TECH — each had surprising power in its own right, but despite the fact that each shared students, there was a surprising lack of communication between each organization. In the past year, it was important to realize the ineffectiveness of the current process, and more importantly, where we needed to go from there.
ON A LITERAL LEVEL
ATAFA literally means Advanced Technologies Academy Foreign Affairs. It’s purpose is to invigorate the foreign affairs community at A-TECH by unifying students, advocating for international ideals and movements (specifically those revolving around the United Nations), and educating students on what’s happening in each member organization and the wider world. This forms the basis for the tagline across all social media platforms:
Unifying, advancing, and advocating strong, global principles through student-to-student organizations at A-TECH.
HOLD ON. WHAT DOES THIS MEAN FOR THE AUTONOMY OF EACH ORGANIZATION?
Great question. Every organization continues to maintain large amounts of independence, they just share information with each other. Having continuous streams of information available let students who might be involved in one organization easily get started in another. Think about how a federation works — the overall federated government gives each province significant autonomy, but each still report to the other and they each provide information to benefit the other. It’s a system that should prove very helpful overall. One example of why this system will be very beneficial is through membership propagation — Model UN provides great interest in the general population, but interest for Academic WorldQuest and GenUN might dwindle because people simply don’t know about it. Providing information about one organization as a part of a larger presentation will provide a platform for those organizations, and hopefully, generate new membership.
WHAT IS ACADEMIC WORLDQUEST? AND GENUN?
Both are really great opportunities for anybody interested in their role in the broader world. Academic WorldQuest (AWQ) is a competition on the United States’ role in the broader world, while GenUN advocates for the ideals and policies of the United Nations in a variety of ways. AWQ has been around for a while, GenUN is brand new. We’ll have articles on the goals of each organization here on Medium soon!
WANT THE FULL RUNDOWN?
Sure. I’ve pieced together the Summer Brief 2016. It goes over every goal and features a lot of things to know. It’s kind of essential. Click here to see it.
WHAT YOU CAN DO NOW
Be sure to check us out on Instagram and Twitter and like our page on Facebook. Stay tuned to any and all of these places for an upcoming General Assembly session.
Oh! And sign up for our slack for immediate person-to-person communication and as-it-happens breaking news updates. Click here to join (use your school email!)
Here’s to a great year.
