For once on a Saturday, the school is open for business. Teenagers flood in, dressed in blazers and dress shoes, most carrying briefcases in hand, some with a source of caffeine in the other. Unlike a majority of their peers, members of the Redondo Union Model United Nations club (MUN), take their history classes into the weekend. South Bay Invitational (SBI), an annual MUN conference held in collaboration among Redondo Union, Palos Verdes Peninsula, and Palos Verdes High School, provides opportunities for each school to work behind the scenes. Dealing out awards, controlling committees, and acting out historical conflicts are some of the tasks handed to participants. These roles are crucial to not only the conference going smoothly, but their own developing MUN skills, and the cultivation of a collaborative environment between the schools with the joining goal of putting on the best conference they can.
“There’s a lot of nerves when you walk into a committee. You start talking to the other delegates, just trying to make some new friends. When you walk in, it seems really quiet and sometimes a lot of the delegates are scared and you kind of look at each other, glancing around, hoping for someone to break that tension,” sophomore Jacob Nguyen, said.
At conferences, students are assigned a country or delegate, depending on their committee, and must try to find a solution for real life, large-scale conflicts, spanning throughout history to modern day, all while acting in their own best interest. The balance beam of finding allies to co-sign onto solutions, while also attempting to fight for an award, is thin, something that even the countless “How to MUN” videos online cannot fully explain. But through working through these tensions, students are given hope and insight to finding solutions in the real world as well.
“You’re speaking to people all of the time, whether it’s a group of 15 people in a small high school conference, or a group of 100 plus at a conference at a college. You work on leadership, teamwork, and cooperation [by] trying to come up with creative solutions,” Nguyen said “You don’t know who you’re going to end up working with at the start of the conference. So [you’re] thinking on the fly about who you’re going to work with, what ideas that you should be targeting, what kind of things you should adapt to as the conference goes on.”
The experience in diplomacy is not limited to those acting as delegates. Working as a “chair,” or a judge, at a MUN conference, can expand not only your general understanding of MUN, but of the importance of acting thoughtfully and appreciating the roles of all members of our community through a smaller-scale lens.
“I think [by chairing] you learn to be more in control of yourself in a way, and also more sympathetic, because once you become a staffer at a conference, you’ve kind of seen both sides of the coin being a delegate and also being staff. It helps to put things into perspective when you end up going to another conference [that] other people [have] felt [nervous] before, I’ve seen it when I was staffing, so I just have to be calm and keep moving forward,” Nguyen said.
Along with providing Redondo students an opportunity to step into a leadership position in MUN, SBI creates a space for a love of academics and debate to be fostered outside of the regular school day. To summarize the experience of MUN, the words “healthy competition,” come to mind for many. A senior and MUN board member, Zander DiLallo, worked to create a level playing field for his committee.
“You don’t want to give someone an advantage,” DiLallo said. “[When walking in,] there’s a sense of evaluating each other, a sense of fear. When I’m chairing a conference, whenever someone gives a good speech, I see people are scared of them, which you would not expect.”
The organization of SBIMUN has a component to it that most conferences do not: the collaboration of three South Bay LA high schools to host. This system of organization creates a distinctive environment in planning, where each school must be on the same page in order for the conference to run as smoothly as they hope.
“SBIMUN is good at being organized and cohesive, especially so because we’re three schools combining to send chairs, which no other school does,” DiLallo said. “It’s unique that we’re able to pull that off.”
