Introducing the new IB community theme - Sharing our humanity

The IB community now includes more than 2000 schools, 500,000 students, teachers, parents, staff and examiners and other colleagues in more than 125 countries. In an effort to strengthen this large and growing community and the IB mission, which we share, the IB has initiated an exciting new project— the IB community theme.

The idea of a community theme was conceived in 2006 and the first theme: sharing our humanity, was officially launched in April 2007 at the annual general meeting.

The theme, lasting three years, is intended to serve as a focus for the IB and IB World Schools, to capture the excellent initiatives that are already underway in many schools and encourage and inspire new activities, in and out of the classroom, around the following topics:

• The fight against poverty
• Peace keeping, conflict prevention, and combating terrorism
• Education for all
• Global infectious disease
• Digital divide
• Natural disaster prevention and mitigation.

(High Noon” by J.F Rischard, 2002)

Over the next six months more information and ideas will be delivered to schools about this theme.

We will be encouraging and facilitating schools to integrate activities around this theme into school life … and to share results, successes and stories with the global IB community.

The IB organization will do the same, for example through conference themes, articles in IB World and in the Online Curriculum Centre.  Our aim is to focus and direct our collective efforts in a way that unite our work and build connections across the IB community.