Wayne Jacoby

President
Global Education Motivators (GEM)
Chestnut Hill College
9601 Germantown Avenue
Philadelphia, PA 19118
www.gem-ngo.org

A global educator for more than 30 years, Wayne co-founded Global Education Motivators (GEM) in 1981 with two other educators when he was a high school social studies teacher for the Springfield (Montco) School District in suburban Philadelphia. Wayne has been President of GEM since its creation and develops and administers the work of GEM from Chestnut Hill College in Philadelphia.

GEM was formed to help bring the world into the classroom at a time when few people were doing it. Under the premise that open communication is an important key to world peace, Wayne was very active with school- to-school student video letters and other early uses of communication technology that was supported by global networks such as the United Nations. In the late 1980’s he also helped develop and manage the first on-line database of the United Nations. It was called UNISER (UN Information Services). In this same ten year period he supervised the development and implementation of cultural “hands-on” study/travel programs for educators to Canada, China, Hawaii, India, Japan and Southeast Asia. These experiential learning programs for teachers helped them broaden their perspectives on the world and passed this on to their students.

This type of work led to several awards including the Freedoms Foundation’s Outstanding Achievement Award and the Beyond War Foundation award for his commitment to solving global problems and various awards from schools in the tri-state area.

Wayne retired from the Springfield School District in 1995 to work full-time at GEM. In 1999 he began developing international videoconferencing programs for Partners in Distance Learning, a consortium of US school districts involved in interactive video conferencing. This set the stage for the variety of distance learning programs he does today.

Wayne and his wife Joanne have one daughter and three grandchildren. They live in Lansdale, PA.