Through the Rotary Youth Exchange program, Minnesota club members send students packing for adventures abroad.
For several years, Jacob Lundell had been thinking about going abroad. His family had hosted two Rotary Youth Exchange students, one from France and one from Denmark. And at Northfield High School in Minnesota, everyone knew about Youth Exchange: In 2013-14, the school sent 19 students abroad and hosted four, from Brazil, Chile, Japan, and Korea.
Yet it wasn’t until the school’s annual informational session in September of his junior year, as he listened to returned exchange students telling their stories, that Lundell made up his mind. He filled out his application, got accepted, and spent his senior year at a bilingual high school in the Croatian capital of Zagreb.
“Rotary was so popular at our school,” Lundell says. After graduation, “people assumed you were either going to college or going to do Youth Exchange.”
Many Northfield students participate in Youth Exchange as a “gap year” between high school and college. That’s what Carly Davidson did in 2010 when she left Minnesota for Brazil. Before she graduated, she had been thinking about it for some time. “Every year, so many students apply,” she says. “We all know the kids who are going to do a year. Everyone reads their blogs. And seeing all the adventures they were having, and hearing about how great their time was, and how challenging it was, made it appealing.”
The Rotary Club of Northfield is part of District 5960, which, with neighboring District 5950, runs a program known as North Star Rotary Youth Exchange. Although the number of U.S. outbound students from all programs, including those not sponsored by Rotary, dropped by 50 percent from 2004 to 2013, the number of students from Northfield increased by more than 100 percent. (The number of foreign students hosted in the United States from all programs rose from 25,815 to 29,698.)
“When I came on in 2005,” says Rick Estenson, vice chair of the North Star Youth Exchange program and a member of the Northfield club, “we took over a program that had already been built. Our club had probably 10 or 12 applicants. We’ve just been putting icing on the cake since then. Now we’re up to 22 applicants.”
It’s hard to pin down a single reason for their success, but part of it stems from club members who are passionate about the program – Rotarians such as Vicki Dilley, who learned the power of cross-cultural exchanges when she and her husband, Lee, served in the Peace Corps in the Pacific island nation of Tuvalu in the 1980s. After moving to Northfield, they started hosting exchange students.
In 2004, one student asked her, “Vicki, why aren’t you a Rotarian?” Dilley recalls. “And since I’ve joined, I’ve been focused on Youth Exchange. I live and breathe it.” She wants others to have the same opportunity she did in Tuvalu. “So much of the way I think is because of that time,” she says.
The leaders in the local school system share her enthusiasm. “One of the critical pieces,” she says, “is our partnership with the high school, which facilitates so much of what happens. In fact, our principal and our superintendent did a video that talks about how the school and the students benefit from Rotary Youth Exchange.”
Another factor that’s helped the program thrive: the four to six students from overseas who attend Northfield High School every year. “A couple of years ago,” Dilley says, “we had a girl from Japan who was homecoming queen. She was less than 5 feet tall, but she was on the girls’ basketball team. She was a star cross-country runner. She embraced everything. And families will remember Mizuki and say, ‘Oh, we’d love to host!’ There are so many kids who’ve had a powerful impact on the vitality and the success of the program here.”
Estenson says a key innovation has been an annual event that brings in former Youth Exchange students to talk about their year. Each one has a table to display maps, souvenirs, and other artifacts from abroad. Every year, more than 100 people attend the gathering, which the club began hosting in 2007 – and which, in turn, has drawn more people into the club.
“I would make the pitch to any Rotarians wanting to grow their club,” Estenson says. “This is exactly how it works: You get families to host students. They learn about Rotary. They’re invited to meetings. And I’m going to guess we have 25 to 30 members who are there specifically because they sent a kid or they hosted a student, or had a neighbor who did.”
Popularity also comes with challenges. Because the North Star program tries to send one student abroad for every inbound student, and Northfield High School has limited slots for inbound exchange students, other clubs in the North Star districts sometimes end up hosting more students than they can send. Still, the Northfield club remains bullish on the number of young people who can take part. “We have about 120 clubs in our two districts,” Estenson says, “but only 50 to 55 of them participate in the program, sending or receiving. So there’s room for growth.”
“I want clubs to know what their potential is,” Dilley says. “Sometimes you don’t know you can run a four-minute mile until someone runs a four-minute mile. I want them to know how far this can go. Like North Star: Our potential is not sending 65 students out. It is much greater than that. And the more kids we have out there as ambassadors, the better the world is going to be.” – Frank Bures
Find out how Rotary Youth Exchange changed Yoko Sekimoto’s life: