Our mission is to prepare tomorrow’s leaders through Model United Nations.
The MUN Institute is an innovative and unique summer program for middle school and high school students who want to gain confidence and learn about MUN and leadership. Our programs teach students valuable skills for college, career, and lifelong learning – public speaking, debate, negotiation, critical thinking, research, teamwork, leadership, and much more.
Our students learn from MUN experts with 18+ years of experience, as well as the best and most inspiring leaders in college-level MUN. After attending the MUN Institute, our amazing alumni go on to start MUN clubs, organize successful conferences, and win numerous awards at some of the most competitive MUN conferences in the world. They also go on to study at the most prestigious universities in the world, including Harvard, Oxford, Yale, and more.
We started the MUN Institute because we know that MUN changes lives. Personally, MUN gave us the skills and confidence we needed to get into Yale and UCLA, find our first jobs at Fortune 100 companies, and start a global education company. We know that MUN prepares today’s students to become tomorrow’s leaders – and the students who do MUN today will certainly end up changing the world.
We invite you to attend the Model United Nations Institute. We hope to see you this summer!
Best,
Ryan Villanueva & Kevin Felix Chan
Co-Founders & Program Directors
About Best Delegate
Best Delegate provides in-person programs that directly impact over 3,700 students and teachers worldwide every year. Its website, BestDelegate.com, is used by over 750,000 Model UN participants from around the world every year and is the thought leader in the development of the global Model United Nations community. Best Delegate has consulted for the United Nations and its work has been featured in the New York Times.
Our flagship program is the Model United Nations Institute, which is the world’s largest Model United Nations summer program, held at top universities including Harvard, Columbia, Georgetown, Berkeley, and UCLA. The MUN Institute has trained thousands of students and teachers at the high school and middle school levels.
Our organization has innovative partnerships that has helped a diverse set of organizations develop their Model UN programs, including organizing conferences at the United Nations Headquarters. This includes partnerships with the United Nations Office on Drug and Crime (UNODC), the World Federation of the United Nations Associations (WFUNA), the United Nations Association of the United States of America (UNA-USA), the United Arab Emirates Ministry of Education, IDEA Public Schools, the US Embassy in Mexico City, and various school districts and nonprofits.
And Best Delegate has provided Model UN workshops for students and advisors held in over twenty countries throughout North America, Latin America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. This includes the Directors Training Institute, a professional development program for teachers in partnership with the THIMUN Foundation and THIMUN Qatar.
Best Delegate was co-founded in 2011 by Ryan Villanueva and Kevin Felix Chan, who met while doing Model UN at a high school conference in Southern California. The two kept in touch as Secretaries-General of the Model UN conferences at Yale and UCLA, respectively, and by volunteering for UNA-USA’s Global Classrooms. They both wanted to give back their Model UN experiences to the community after graduation, and eventually decided to quit their jobs at Goldman Sachs and AT&T, respectively, to turn a blog that Ryan had started at his dorm room at Yale into a global education organization dedicated to helping others succeed through Model United Nations.
