
On Wednesday, 29 January 2025, our Club will welcome Ms Louise Sempala, Fort Collins Rotary Exchange Student from Uganda.
Rotary Youth Exchange builds peace one young person at a time. Candidates are ages 15-19 and are leaders in their secondary schools and communities. Rotary Youth Exchange inspires young leaders to serve as catalysts for peace and social justice in their local communities and throughout the world, long after their exchanges end. This program is possible because of the dedication, leadership, and passion of the tens of thousands of volunteers — Rotary members and nonmembers alike — who make this unique program so successful.
Typically, students are sent to another country for a year-long stay, generally living with multiple host families during the year, and are expected to perform daily tasks within the household as well as attend school in the host country. Short-term exchange programs are also quite common. These often involve direct student exchanges between two families, arranged through Rotary to coincide with major school holiday periods.
The Rotary Club of Copenhagen, Denmark initiated the first Rotary exchange in 1927, and the Rotary Club of Nice, France followed suit soon after in 1929. Although exchanges today typically last ten months, the first exchange took place during school vacations for only a couple of weeks. The year-long Rotary Youth Exchange program was created in 1958 in Lake Placid at a Rotary Governors' Assembly. Here, many rules and procedures were established that still exist today. The first year-long exchange conducted by Rotary under this new framework involved a student leaving Scottsbluff, Nebraska, to live in Myrtleford, Australia for 10 months, and two Australians from Myrtleford arriving in Grand Lake, Colorado. In the following years, more and more countries became involved in the program. In 1962, the first exchange involving Japan and Germany was arranged after tense relations between them and other Rotary International Clubs following World War II. Since its conception 90 years ago, the Rotary Youth Exchange program has expanded rapidly, exchanging 9,000 students annually between 80 different nations.
Through the Rotary Youth Exchange, Rotary International hopes to create a more interconnected and understanding world. One of Rotary's primary goals is to promote peace around the world, and through the Rotary Youth Exchange, it aims to make the world more peaceful. This rationale follows the logic that if a student experiences different cultures and meets people from all around the world, they will become more understanding of foreign people and countries in the future. Rotary expects that this understanding will lead to a more interconnected and peaceful world.