Youth For Understanding
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| Founded | 1951 |
|---|---|
| Founder | Rachel Andresen |
| Location | |
| Origins | Ann Arbor, Michigan |
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Area served
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Worldwide |
| Method | International Exchange Programs |
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Key people
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Rachel Andresen, Eric Simon, Ulrich Zalthen |
| Slogan | Make the world your home. |
| Mission | Make the world your home. YFU advances intercultural understanding, mutual respect, and social responsibility through educational exchanges for youth, families, and communities. |
| Website | YFU.org |
Youth For Understanding (YFU) is an international educational exchange organization. A network of over 50 independent national organizations worldwide, YFU representatives work together to advance learning across cultures. Within each country's culture, YFU organizations subscribe to and operate under a common set of principles and standards that aim to facilitate cooperation and harmony. Each year, YFU exchanges approximately 4,500 students worldwide.
YFU conducts its exchange programs via direct contact between independent national organizations in over 50 countries. These autonomous organizations represent the international community network of YFU. Other YFU international activities are carried out by a volunteer International Advisory Council and a professional staff known as the International Secretariat. YFU organizations around the world subscribe to a set of basic operating and philosophic standards that embody YFU’s commitment to conducting high quality programs. The standards set the basic requirements that YFU programs must meet.
In 1951 it was proposed to church leaders in Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA that teenagers from Germany be brought to the United States to live with a family and attend high school for a year. As a result, 75 German teenagers arrived in Michigan in July 1951 and were hosted by volunteer U.S. families.
The exchange program itself originated in late summer 1951 by the High Commission in Germany as the "Urban/Rural Teen-Age Exchange Program". Already in its first year it was supported by members of the Michigan Council of Churches (MCC) under the motto "Youth for Understanding". Within the next 10 years it evolved into two organizations YFU-USA and YFU-Germany. The first "exchange" from the USA to Germany was a summer program with 30 US high school students organized by MCC-alumni. During that year, Germany became a sovereign country, and the US government stopped funding the exchange program with Germany, which continued as a not-for-profit activity between the two YFU organizations. In 1961/62, a one-year exchange program from the US to Germany was added with 6 initial students from the US. The first exchanges across the Pacific (with Japan) and to Mexico were established in 1958, and South America in 1959.
YFU, Inc., the non-profit educational organization, was established in 1964, and the organization's offices were moved to Rosedale in Washington, D.C. in 1978.
During most of the 1990s, YFU, Inc. served as the primary administrative organization for applications and interviews in the Congress-Bundestag Youth Exchange (CBYX) scholarship program, overseen by the now defunct United States Information Agency (USIA). With the dissolution of the USIA toward the end of 1999, the CBYX scholarship program began to be reorganized on a regional basis, and YFU ceased its central administrative control.
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