As the United States prepares to mark its 250th birthday, a nonprofit is using the moment to try to knit the country a little closer together, ABC News reported. The American Exchange Project is now in its seventh year of connecting young people from very different corners of the country with one another.
The scheme works much like a foreign exchange program, except that it keeps students within the United States. It is free and open to young people who have just graduated from high school, offering them the chance to see parts of the country they might never otherwise reach on their own.
The pairings are designed to be a study in contrasts. A teenager used to the concrete bustle of New York City might spend a week near the Badlands of Wyoming, while a student more accustomed to the wilderness of Alaska could instead find themselves on the coast of Maine for the first time.
The experience is built around two halves. Each participant spends one week travelling to an unfamiliar town and another week hosting a visitor in their own community, so that the exchange runs in both directions rather than being a simple one-way trip across the map.
The project grew out of a personal journey by its co-founder and chief executive, David McCullough. He told ABC News that a road trip had changed his own life, recalling how he grew up in a leafy suburb of Boston before borrowing his mother's car and driving some 7,100 miles across the country.
Over two months he lived in three towns that could not have been more different from his own, in Texas, in Pine Ridge in South Dakota, and in Cleveland, Ohio. He said he had been warned the trip might not be safe for him, but instead found himself welcomed and almost adopted everywhere he went, and the friendships he made reshaped how he saw the country.
That experience, he said, convinced him that many young Americans today are growing up in towns that are too homogeneous, leaving them with little exposure to people whose lives are very different from their own. In a nation as large and diverse as the United States, he argued, that gap could become a problem, and his answer was to send the next generation out onto the road to make friends of their own.