Travel is a powerful teacher. New places offer new perspectives and personal connections can dissolve political assumptions.
In a nation divided and defined by its differences, one nonprofit group is committed to bridging the gaps, one young person at a time.
The American Exchange Project (AEP) rethinks the traditional foreign exchange programs that for decades have been sending students across the world, often with remarkable and life-changing results. Founded in 2019, AEP focuses not on the distance a student travels, but the difference they experience by spending time in a U.S. town that’s entirely unlike their own, with other teens from other places and backgrounds. And the week they spend in another place costs the student nothing — other than spending money for souvenirs. Airfare, lodging, meals and activities are covered.
“We’re stitching our country together, one student, one high school, one hometown at a time,” states the AEP website at americanexchangeproject.org.
Key West High School, one of about 53 partner high schools in 31 states that has recently joined AEP, last week welcomed five recent high school graduates, all of them 18.
The group stayed in a downtown rental house and spent a week exploring the island and connecting with each other and with an assortment of local high school students who joined them for snorkeling trips, museum tours, the Turtle Hospital in Marathon and other activities.
Kimberly Rein, director of the media center at KWHS, was the AEP exchange manager. She worked with Chuck Licis, director of Monroe County’s Take Stock in Children scholarship program, to create an itinerary for the visiting students, and start publicizing the opportunity for Key West students to travel to another city next summer.
The nonprofit program operates with private donations and grants from the Hearthland Foundation, founded by Steven Spielberg and Kate Capshaw.
“Toxic polarization has moved into our daily lives, corroding our faith in one another and our democracy, shaping the choices we make, the people we associate with, and the places we call home,” the website states. “As a consequence, our kids are growing up isolated in bubbles that … limit their development as young adults and young citizens.
“Welcoming the stranger, hometown pride, a deep love of our children, and a reverence for the character building journey — these are deeply American ideals. AEP harnesses them, along with the energy and curiosity of young people, to create a solution: a free domestic youth exchange program.”
AEP aims to show the next generation that despite our diverse backgrounds, we are fundamentally similar – and to empower them to become agents of change in their own communities and beyond.
Signups open on Oct. 1 and close in January. Students learn where they’re headed on March 1.
Founder David McCullough III created the project in 2019 after a two-month road trip that included Boston, Ohio, Texas and South Dakota. In all places, he made friends with fellow Americans who seemed at first like “foreigners,” who taught him new words, new ideas, new ways of life.
