The Brazilian Youth Ambassadors Panel was held Thursday, Jan. 22 in the Allen Chapman Student Union. The panel, organized in part by the Brazilian Club, Center for Global Education and Tulsa Global Alliance, consisted of 50 Brazilian students, all of whom represent their schools and towns as outstanding students.
Renan Kuntz, a member of the TU Brazil Club, spoke about the panel and the Youth Ambassadors program. “The Youth Ambassadors program is a program which every year sends students from Brazil. They’re… outstanding leaders in their communities—they’re very active in volunteering and making change.”
“Tulsa is one of the host cities that always receives people,” said Kuntz. “They’re coming to TU to visit the campus, and also to share what they do in Brazil…. They’ll be sharing about their culture, they really want to know how (the) college experience (is) and about American culture.”
Kuntz was introduced to TU through the Youth Ambassadors program. “I didn’t come to Tulsa, I went to Montana, but… everyone gets to know each other, and (the students who came to Tulsa) went to Booker T. Washington.”
Kuntz became friends with a girl from Booker T., who discovered a scholarship for South American students to study at TU. “I applied, and I didn’t get that scholarship but I got another one.… That’s basically how I got here.”
The Youth Ambassadors program “was developed and is still carried out by the US Embassy in Brazil. It is also funded by the US State Department” with hopes to “strengthen partnerships between Brazil and the US,” said Kuntz. “They kind of pick all these students who are very outstanding and very active where they are from and they see those students as being the future of Brazil, and so they want to be preparing for having more partnerships between Brazil in the future.”