The first time I spoke in a Model UN committee, I had no idea what a moderated caucus was. Over the next few years I attended more than twenty conferences and learned the rules the slow way, by getting them wrong in front of a room. By the time I won Best Delegate at Harvard Model United Nations India, I had noticed something about the people around me. Almost all of them came from schools that could afford to send them, train them and pay their fees.
The skill is not the expensive part
What MUN teaches is simple to describe. You research a country whose views may be nothing like your own. You write a position paper. You stand up and argue for that position in front of strangers, and then you find the people who disagree with you and try to write a resolution you can all sign. None of that needs money. What costs money is access: coaching, conference fees, and someone who already knows how it all works.
In 2023 I founded Youth of Tomorrow Model United Nations to remove that barrier. YTMUN is free for every participant. It runs online, so a student does not need to live in a city with a conference circuit, and it assumes that nobody has done this before.
How an edition works
Every edition has two halves. First comes training: online sessions on researching a country's position, writing a position paper, speaking in committee and drafting resolutions. Then comes the conference, where delegates use all of it under real rules of procedure, with chairs who give them feedback.
As Secretary-General, I built this from nothing, recruiting a secretariat, writing the training programme, choosing agendas and running the conference days. The first edition had 30 delegates. The second had 60 and the third 100. Across five editions, more than 500 students from over 25 countries have taken part.
What chairing taught me
Running YTMUN changed how I behave on the other side of the dais. I have chaired seven committees, including the UN Security Council at Spring MUN 2026 with over 35 delegates, and served on the executive boards of JBCNMUN, OISMUN and Spring MUN. A good chair is rarely the loudest person in the room. The job is to keep debate fair, to notice the delegate who has not spoken yet, and to give feedback that a nervous first-timer can actually use.
Teaching beginners made me better at that. When you write training for someone who has never seen a committee, you cannot hide behind jargon. You have to explain why a rule exists as well as what it says.
Why it stays free
Charging a small fee would make YTMUN easier to grow. I have kept it free because a fee is exactly the barrier it was built to remove. A student in a country with no MUN circuit, or at a school with no budget for it, should still be able to learn to argue a position, listen to the other side and negotiate a compromise. Those skills matter well beyond a conference hall.
