Every year, the conferences get bigger. Six hundred delegates becomes nine hundred. Twelve committees becomes twenty. The case for scale is intuitive — more delegates, more revenue, more reputation. We disagree, deliberately. Here is why.
The problem scale solves — and the one it creates
A 600-delegate conference solves real problems. It absorbs more applicants. It produces more alumni. It allows specialised committees — historical reenactments, niche bodies, regional councils — that wouldn't fill at smaller scale. None of that is wrong.
But it creates one structural problem nobody likes to name: in a 40-delegate chamber, most delegates speak twice in three days. The rest are background. The chair sees the same five faces; the rubric scores the same five names; the gavel goes to one of those five before unmod even begins. Everyone in the room can feel it within the first afternoon.
The scale that lets the conference run is the same scale that lets most delegates leave without having been trained. Not undertrained. Not somewhat trained. Untrained — three days of attending, not three days of practising.
What we mean by training
We use the word literally. We do not mean "exposure to the format." We mean the same thing a music conservatory or a writing workshop means by training: deliberate practice, in front of someone who can see what you can't yet see, with feedback you act on before you do it again.
That definition has consequences. It means every delegate gets to speak — not as a courtesy, but because speaking time is the unit of practice. It means every paper gets read by a chair before debate begins. It means the cohort is small enough that the mentors know your name, your country, your last speech, and your three weakest moves.
You cannot do that for 600 delegates. You can barely do it for 200. We do it for 80 to 120 delegates a year. That ceiling is intentional.
The single-committee design
Most flagship conferences run a dozen or more parallel committees. We run one — the United Nations General Assembly, plenary format. There are three reasons.
First, every delegate experiences the most prestigious chamber in the world rather than a niche body. The General Assembly is the body the UN itself describes as the most representative deliberative organ in international life. Sitting in it — even in simulation — is its own argument.
Second, a single committee concentrates the chair team. Twelve committees mean twelve chair pairs, which inevitably vary in experience and standards. One committee means we can put our most senior chairs in front of every delegate.
Third, and most quietly, a single chamber forces a different kind of negotiation. With 80 delegates rather than 25, the bloc geometry is denser; the lobbying is harder; the quality of compromise required to pass a resolution is higher. The committee is more crowded — but the work is also more like the actual UN.
The trade-offs we accept
Choosing this design means accepting trade-offs honestly.
We turn away applications. Every year. Some of them are strong. We hate it. We do it anyway, because the alternative is to dilute the experience for everyone we accept.
We don't simulate the Security Council, ECOSOC, the IAEA, or the historical bodies that some delegates love. If those committees are what you want, there are excellent conferences that run them. We are not for everyone, and we don't want to pretend otherwise.
We charge what we charge — not because the experience is exclusive, but because individual mentorship at this ratio is expensive to staff. We offer financial aid, and we are explicit about it on the application page. The price is real and we don't hide it.
The thing we don't compromise on
A delegate who walks out of YIMUN should be visibly different from the delegate who walked in. They should write a stronger paper. They should give a stronger speech. They should know how to lobby a room of strangers, and how to merge two competing working papers, and how to accept a friendly amendment without losing face. Those are not abstract goals. They are the only goals.
If you've ever sat through a 400-delegate chamber and never got the floor — you understand why we built it this way. If you haven't, this is what we wish someone had built for us when we first started.
— The Youth Impacts team