Youth Organizations: American Field Service
The American Field Service (AFS) is a nonprofit volunteer-based educational organization concerned with promoting understanding among people throughout the world. Its purposes are to involve high school students, young adults, and teachers in the family, community, and school life of other nations.
Program
Each year the AFS sends more than 10,000 students, young adults, and teachers to a foreign country through one of its several international exchange programs. Through its Americans Abroad Program, the AFS annually provides opportunities for approximately 1,700 American high school juniors and seniors to live and study in one of forty-four foreign countries for a year, a semester, or a summer. Each year, the AFS also brings approximately 2,500 high school students from more than fifty countries to the United States to live for one year or one semester with an American family and attend the local high school. High school graduates can participate in the AFS Community Service Program, which sends men and women for four months to a year to one of twenty countries to perform volunteer work. Community Service volunteers may work with street children, orphans, or people with disabilities. Volunteers may also tutor children in local schools or participate in community development and environmental programs.
Through its Global Educators Program, the AFS sends American teachers, counselors, and educational administrators to Argentina, China, Indonesia, Mexico, South Africa, Spain, Thailand, and several other countries. Exchange educators live with host families and teach in local schools for one month or one semester. The AFS also brings teachers from other countries to live and teach in the United States for a semester or a year.
AFS programs are administered in cooperation with volunteer organizations throughout the world and with the help of local volunteer chapters in the U.S. communities where students are placed. Participating students and teachers must pay their own program fees. The AFS helps by offering more than $1 million each year in financial aid and scholarships through the Awards for Excellence Merit Scholarship, the AFS World Citizen Scholarship, the Stephen Galatti Scholarships, and other AFS scholarship and financial aid programs.
Organization
The AFS is controlled by fifty international trustee members, who meet annually to review policies, guide the development of programs, and elect a board of directors, which conducts the organization's business throughout the year. In most foreign countries participating in AFS programs, a small paid staff coordinates the work of volunteers and serves as liaison with international headquarters. In some counties, a private citizen, a binational center director, or a cultural assistant on the U.S. embassy staff handles the representation procedures.
Membership
In the United States there are approximately 3,000 chapters that represent the AFS program in every high school in which an overseas student is placed. These schools are eligible to nominate candidates for the AFS Americans Abroad Program. Each chapter assumes financial responsibility for an overseas student; many chapters also raise funds to assist needy Americans Abroad students.
History
In 1914 Americans residing in Paris, France, organized the AFS as a volunteer ambulance service to assist French hospitals in the evacuation of the wounded from the French war front. Additional volunteers formed both ambulance and trucking units under the command of the French armies. After World War I the remaining funds were used to operate a postgraduate scholarship program for the exchange of American and French students. During World War II the AFS provided ambulance drivers for the French forces and later for the British forces in the Middle East. Units also served in Italy, France, Germany, and on the India - Burma front. The international scholarship exchange program began in 1947 when fifty-two students came from ten countries to the United States for one year. Since then, nearly 290,000 students have participated in AFS exchange programs.
Internet Resource
American Field Service. 2002. www.afs.org.
— EDITH M. LERRIGO, Revised by, JUDITH J. CULLIGAN
