Grammar Gazette- Issue 1, 2014

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AUTHOR Mrs Anne Ingram Dean of Students

INTERNATIONAL YOUNG LEADERS FORUM 2013

Eight Year 10 students were selected to represent Brisbane Girls Grammar School at the IYLF in 2013 — Angela Goggin, Harriet Horton, Jacinta MacGinley, Gemma Coyne, Emma Cockburn, Kaamilah Senese, Macada Roebig and Isabelle Heath. Macada Roebig described her first experience of the IYLF as ‘being greeted by a multitude of colour, culture and language that would ultimately culminate in in one of the most fulfilling of experiences’. The week-long, live-in programme provided the girls with a myriad of opportunities to participate in workshops, lectures and discussions centred on leadership, culture and sustainability. Key events included a lecture by Professor Ian Frazer and a presentation by Her Excellency Ms Penelope Wensley AC, Governor of Queensland, whose passion was evident as she spoke about leadership in an ever-evolving world. ‘We learnt that a true leader is someone who is not afraid to act, to trust, to fail, to fall, to look the fool, to praise and to laugh. We learnt that a true leader is not someone who stands back and tells their tug-of-war team to pull harder, but someone who walks to the front of the rope, takes hold and pulls with all the strength they can muster’. (Macada Roebig , 11H)

The International Young Leaders Forum (IYLF) is hosted in turn by members of an alliance of six schools in the Asia Pacific region — Binus International School in Indonesia, Bugil Academy in South Korea, Hwa Chong Institution in Singapore, Suzhou Foreign Language School in China, and Brisbane Grammar School and Brisbane Girls Grammar School in Queensland, Australia. In 2013, an invitation was extended to Brisbane Girls Grammar School to attend as an affiliate school. Following a most successful Forum hosted by Brisbane Grammar School, Brisbane Girls Grammar School was invited to become a member of the alliance. The IYLF alliance was initially formed in 2009 and the first Forum was hosted by Suzhou Foreign Language School. While the overall objective of the Forum is to create a platform for student leaders from the participating schools to interact, to develop new networks and to inculcate in them a keen awareness of global issues and a strong sense of social responsibility, each individual Forum held across the years has also had its own objectives significance of the opportunity to become part of a global network of young leaders cannot be underestimated. Each year the Forum provides the delegates with a wonderful environment in which to promote intercultural understanding as they experience the culture of the host school and sample the cultures of the other delegate schools. which marry with these overall aims. For the delegates from each school, the

WINTER ISSUE / 2014