Global Leader Lecture Series

The Global Leader Lecture and Workshop for GEfIL dai 7 kisei was conducted as an intensive program over four days in Fukushima Prefecture with the best possible countermeasures against COVID-19. This was the first intensive camp of GEfIL outside the campus since the COVID-19 pandemic started in the spring of 2020.

The theme of the workshop this year was “Leadership, entrepreneurship, and citizenship for sustainability.” Keynote speakers were Mr. Eiju Hangai, Representative Director of Asubito Fukushima, and Mr. Takeshi Komino, General Secretary of CWS Japan, a non-profit organization. Based on his own experience, Mr. Hangai lectured on leadership theory of social value creation through a combination of sensitivity, emotion, balance between altruism and selfishness, and followers. Mr. Komino touched on the current situation of the worst humanitarian crisis since World War II, and then drew on his own experiences in recovery and reconstruction after the Great East Japan Earthquake to explain the importance of "localization" in dealing with a wide range of disasters and risks, and the skills needed to do so. The participants and the speakers enjoyed fruitful discussion with many questions raised by the students.

On the afternoon of the second day, a site visit, lecture, and workshop were held to learn about reconstruction community planning through the decentralized local energy project in Shinchi Town. On the third day, the students had a visit to an intermediate storage facility in Okuma Town in the morning and site visits and discussions with local residents in Futaba Town and Odaka Ward in Minami-Soma City in the afternoon. Through these field experiences, the students were able to experience the scale of reconstruction and urban (re)development and understand its complexity and multilayered structure.
They also had the opportunity to talk with various experts, government officials, and entrepreneurs who are working to create social value, and learned about their respective positions and roles, while also realizing that they themselves have their own positions as citizens.

Seven students participated in the workshop from the planning stage as steering committee members, providing leadership in designing teamwork tasks and facilitating discussions. The students were able to learn and change themselves as global leaders through a series of on-site experiences, keynote speeches, workshops, and so on. Based on their inspirations and lessons on the roles and combination of top-down and bottom-up leadership in reconstruction and community (re)development, and how leadership, entrepreneurship, and citizenship should be perceived and implemented, each team discussed what they should learn and practice as global leaders. On the final day, each team gave a 10-minute presentation, and the camp concluded with a discussion session among the students and feedbacks by the faculty.