My Experience at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Ithaca National Student Dialogue

Through the Center for Democracy and Civic Life’s leadership opportunities like STRiVE, ASB, and now as a special projects intern at the Center for Democracy and Civic Life, I have been finding an unexpected calling in thinking about how a democracy actually expands and what true leadership looks like. 

Dr. David Hoffman, the director of the Center, invited me to apply and I was accepted to the 6th Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF) Ithaca National Student Dialogue (NSD) hosted by the University of Delaware’s Biden School of Public Policy & Administration. NSD is a two-day summit for over 100 college students from across the nation, bringing together a diverse group to discuss, debate, and develop policy solutions that would benefit from bi-partisan collaboration. 

Over the course of a weekend, the event celebrates student leaders and facilitates discussions, panels, and town halls that train students to more effectively and respectfully engage with one another in policy discussions on their campuses and in their communities.​ We discussed our experiences with AI and the importance of public discourse. We also worked in small groups to innovate solutions to campus problems like polarization or apathy.

As I engaged with students from other colleges, I was struck by just how distinct UMBC is when it comes to our culture of agency and collaboration. Our student government is structured around initiatives and creating student-focused change, whereas many other colleges still hold structures and cultures of competition, which ultimately lessens the collective power of their students to create change. 

Furthermore, as I broke into my small group focused on the problem of student apathy, I became critically aware that something was missing in our group’s approach. We were a room full of quite agentic students and yet rather than letting our own experiences of arriving at agency help orient us to solutions, we were stuck grasping at the meaning of words and trying to put them into arbitrary categories. As far as I’m aware, no other students or the professor who was facilitating saw this missed opportunity, so I, overcoming my fear of being different, proposed that we share some of our greatest experiences of agency. 

From there we collectively derived patterns that deepened the quality and creativity of our solutions. Learning to notice and act upon opportunities to improve the group’s problem-solving process is something that generations of students, like me, have learned through unique opportunities at UMBC like STRiVE and SGA, and something that has driven our uniquely innovative, student-led culture. And in that moment, I learned another lesson about what it means to be a leader.

Overall, I learned that there is a deep and pressing need for the type of leadership and thinking around democracy that is grounded in my and UMBC’s value of inclusive excellence. This culture that I’ve taken for granted needs expanding so that students everywhere can realize the power of their own experiences, organize across differences, and enact innovative solutions. One way I hope to do this is by collaborating with the other student leaders I met in this conference, to think about ways we can expand student agency at our own colleges and include more students in the change-making process. 

And in the decades it would take to truly grasp the insights from this conference and the questions it raised in me, I might just have found a life’s calling. 

Duncan Winger ‘29
Special Projects Intern, Center for Democracy and Civic Life

photo caption: Former U.S. President Joseph Biden and Duncan Winger at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Ithaca National Student Dialogue summit, hosted by the University of Delaware’s Biden School of Public Policy & Administration