What our consultants did this year.

A week in Beijing: CIDGA’s international summer school

In July, five SEESALT consultants were in the same building for the first time. They came from five campuses — New Haven, Ithaca, New York, Boston and Saint Paul — for the International Summer School on Country and Regional Studies and Global Development at China Agricultural University’s College of International Development and Global Agriculture (CIDGA). For a week they shared lecture halls, field visits, late-night draft edits and a roundtable stage.

The programme asks a question close to SEESALT’s own: how does knowledge about development actually travel — between countries, between generations, between the people who study a place and the people who live there? Participants from China and abroad worked through it in seminars and fieldwork, and presented their own research to the cohort at the end.

When the programme named its ten outstanding participants, four SEESALT consultants were on the list: Qianli Xu (first-year MA/PhD, Cornell CALS), ranked first in the programme; Yuqing Bai (PhD student, New York University); Zhijun He (MA candidate, Yale; SEESALT’s founder), who also helped run the programme’s flagship roundtable on global development exchange; and Wen Xin (undergraduate, Macalester). Yilun Wang (Boston University) completed the group of five.

The number that matters to us is not four out of ten. It is that everyone on that list is still a student. SEESALT was founded on the idea that the best guidance comes from people who are still learning in public. Our thanks to CIDGA and its faculty for the invitation. Read the full post

Bridging nations through youth diplomacy

Yilun represented China at the 2025 Trilateral Youth Summit, one of forty-eight students from China, Japan and Korea meeting under the theme “Designing the Future for All Generations”. The summit, co-hosted by the Trilateral Cooperation Secretariat and Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs with support from the Chinese and Korean foreign ministries, ran from 1 to 8 August.

He sat on one of four committees — humanities exchange and youth education, sustainable development and disaster relief, economic cooperation with technology and regional revitalisation, and health for ageing societies — each tasked with policy recommendations that could be implemented across the three countries. The work was debate, negotiation and drafting: balancing national positions against regional cooperation. Outside the sessions he met government officials, visited the Osaka–Kansai World Expo, and built the cross-border friendships the summit exists to build.

Read the Trilateral Cooperation Secretariat’s report

From campus to community: a circular economy in Kokrobite

Over the summer Matthew built a recycling and entrepreneurship initiative in Kokrobite that drew 350 residents to its first clean-up, connected 17 entrepreneurs with investors, and set up a buyback centre that, by the project team’s August count, processes more than 30 metric tons of plastic a month. Working with local entrepreneurs Chris Sesa and Solomon, it turns collected waste into baled material for buyers and returns the margin to the informal recyclers who were already doing the work.

Two Kokrobite chiefs endorsed the project; members of parliament supported it; Danone, Nestlé and MODEC Ghana took an interest, as did the Atlantic Council and the US Development Finance Corporation. Replications were planned for August and November 2025. The entrepreneurs it supports now make shelves, lamps and furniture from recovered plastic.

Matthew has been mentored through the project by our founder. “Visionary leaders find opportunities wherever they go,” Zhijun says of him; Matthew calls his method a rapid, multi-sector engagement model, and the Kokrobite page tells the full story. Kokrobite (Terra ’25) · Support the next upcycling event

Leading innovation from Latin America to the world stage

At the 2025 World Bank Group Youth Summit, Zonglin led his team to a Global Runner-Up (third place) finish in the Innovation Lab with a solution combining technology, sustainability and community engagement for creative-industry SMEs in Latin America. In the same year he took the valedictorian award in the University of Chicago’s Monetary Policy and International Finance programme.

As project lead of VerdeVision, he is designing Ecopia, an online multiplayer climate-activism simulator for Latin American youth, drawing on six years living in Mexico and fluency in Spanish. He has managed Roblox projects before — leading twenty students to a national award for a cultural gaming project — and served as Regional Contact Person for Southern Europe at Youth and Environment Europe. He came to Macalester (Economics and International Studies) from UWC in Bosnia and Herzegovina, where he scored 40 of 42 on the IB diploma while running campaigns on plastic and renewable energy. VerdeVision (Terra ’26)