Bond University's Faculty of Society & Design was pleased to host this year’s Bond University High School Model United Nations (BUHMUN) Conference on the Gold Coast.
The BUHMUN 2019 conference, held earlier this year in May, ran for two days with students travelling to Bond from around Australia to participate.
The conference theme for this year was “to promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provPeace and sustainable development ide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels.”
BUHMUN is Australia’s first University run High School Model UN conference.
A Model UN, or MUN, is a simulation-based learning exercise that sees student delegates adopt the persona of an allocated country and subsequently represent that country during a simulation of UN proceedings.
Bond University’s Assistant Professor of International Relations and Conference Convenor, Mark Dinnen, explained that this year the conference incorporated new elements to proceedings.
“This year’s BUHMUN was our most ambitious yet, teaming up with the UN Office of Drugs and Crimes’ Education for Justice Initiative to have High School students deliberate on Sustainable Development Goal 16: Peace, Justice, and Strong Institutions,” he said.
“With close to eighty students working over four different committee rooms addressing a total of sixteen topics, we were overwhelmingly impressed with the strengths and skills displayed by the High School students.
“This year we also introduced BUHMUN Journalism which challenged an additional fourteen students to “cover” the conference proceedings and then published their efforts online and a small newsletter on day two,” he said.
“By all accounts, BUHMUN 2019 was a tremendous success, thanks in large part to the effort of the Planning Committee and our volunteer Bondies who became the BUHMUN Secretariat.”
Bond’s Faculty of Society and Design are looking forward to welcoming back high school students for the 2020 BUHMUN Conference.