Fund named after late HBHS Model U.N. teacher sponsors students’ East Coast trip

The late Huntington Beach High School Model United Nations teacher Lynn Aase also coached baseball for the Oilers.

He approached his Model U.N. class almost as if he was in the dugout.

“His teaching style was very much aligned around the rubric of coaching,” said Doug Bradley, part of Aase’s first four-year Model U.N. class who graduated from Huntington Beach High in 1976. “He didn’t employ the usual, ‘sit down and read your book’ approach. He was very much like a coach in the classroom, as much as he was on the baseball field. His approach to teaching was highly personal.”

Aase retired from teaching in 2004. The Huntington Beach High Model U.N. program he built, now featuring Shaun Haney as an adviser, remains one of the most prestigious and largest ones around with about 350 students.

When Aase died in April 2021, Model U.N. alumni started talking.

“The more we look, we find out that his impact really was lifelong,” said Bradley, now a redistricting commissioner for Santa Barbara County. “We really felt like we owed something back.”

Lynn Aase, who died in April 2021, was a longtime Model United Nations teacher at Huntington Beach High.

(Courtesy of Lynn Aase MUN Legacy Foundation )

Bradley is the president of the nonprofit Lynn Aase MUN Legacy Foundation, which was created with the goal of giving back to current HBHS Model U.N. students who might need financial help to travel to conferences. That goal was realized in a tangible way last month.

The foundation funded half of the costs for two students, $1,200 each, to attend a Model U.N. conference at Harvard University. And since this happens to be the 50th anniversary of Aase starting the program, the goal is to raise a total of $50,000 by July 1, when a celebration will be held at Meadowlark Golf Club. The organization’s GoFundMe page currently sits at just more than $32,000 raised.

Kim Peasley, the Lynn Aase MUN Legacy Foundation secretary and another of Aase’s former students, said he would often pay from his own pocket to help his students get to the East Coast. Now, there is another mechanism in place to help them.

“When you’re in this program, it’s a very competitive program, it’s very hard,” Peasley said. “By the time you get to be a junior or senior, you’re eligible to go to one of those trips on the East Coast, but those are paid for by the families. If a kid can’t afford it, that’s sad, because they’ve gone through all that effort to get to the top.”

Oilers senior Joshua Dang is one of the two students who received aid this year for the Harvard trip, which took place over 10 days in late January. Dang said he was extremely grateful as the current economy and inflation had rendered him unable to go otherwise.

Dang, one of the secretary generals of the Model U.N. program, said he met friends from all around the world on the trip, which also included a visit to Washington, D.C. The HBHS group represented Kuwait and Mozambique.

“I wasn’t able to go to a travel conference last year to compete, as well as get closer to my classmates,” Dang said. “This allowed me to meet people around the world. I still have friends I keep in contact with from Honduras, and I met people from Venezuela, Brazil, Tunesia. It was a really awesome experience, on top of just being able to go to Harvard as well.”

Lynn Aase coached baseball and taught at Huntington Beach High.

(Courtesy of the Lynn Aase MUN Legacy Foundation)

Jill Hardy, a former member of the Huntington Beach City Council who was in the Edison Model U.N. program when she was in high school, now sits on the board of the foundation. Hardy, a math teacher at Marina, was an adviser for the HBHS program in the 2000s following Aase’s retirement.

“This was special that the first two that were sponsored from this fund went to Harvard,” Hardy said. “That was the first trip out of state that Lynn Aase took students on, the Harvard conference. Harvard was always special in Lynn’s heart. Even the years he didn’t go, you always knew that first Harvard conference was so special to him.”

Bradley said he’s also hoping to recruit some “younger blood” for the board, people who were in the program in the 1990s or early 2000s. Either way, he is happy that his former high school Model U.N. program is thriving.

He pointed at the war in Ukraine as an example of why students need to learn diplomatic skills.

“I believe that diplomacy is something that requires a lot of hard work, a perishable skill, it has to be constantly renewed and taught to young people as early as possible,” Bradley said. “Those skills carry on into the workplace, our political arenas and international affairs. At least for me, personally, that’s one of the great values of this program.”

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