How these teens are uniting America one hometown at a time

Lorenzo Lisi wasn’t sure how he’d feel being in a town where gun ownership is common. Unlike his hometown of Palo Alto, California, guns are a regular part of life in Kilgore, Texas, where Lisi spent a week this summer as part of the American Exchange Project, a program that sends recent high school graduates to experience a place in the U.S. that is radically different from their hometown.

At first, Lisi felt uneasy in Kilgore, but as he spent more time in the community getting to know the locals, he was surprised by how safe he felt. “It was important to have that experience of feeling safe and knowing that there are guns around to have a mindful conversation about whether guns belong in a society,” the 18-year-old said.

Outside of his comfort zone, which was largely shaped by growing up in America’s progressive and affluent tech hub, Lisi’s education continued. In Kilgore, he helped brand and vaccinate cows — his job involved lifting the cow’s tail, which helps the animal remain calm when pressure is applied to certain nerves during the procedure. “It was a very eye-opening experience, because it’s a process that is not pretty,” said Lisi, recalling the clanging of metal, the mooing and manure everywhere. “It’s something I’ve never even thought of — when you’re eating beef, you don’t really know what goes on behind the scenes.”

Ultimately, despite their differences, Lisi felt embraced by his Kilgore peers, who became like a “second family” over the course of the week. The experience was not unlike a foreign exchange program, except that it was within the the U.S.

By designing a domestic cultural experience, the American Exchange Project aims to introduce the richness and diversity of America to young people so they can better understand communities and viewpoints different than their own. With these exchanges, and ensuing friendships, the project leaders hope to heal America’s divisions and polarization. As the program’s website declares, “We’re stitching our country together, one student, one high school, one hometown at a time.”

‘Red to blue, rich to poor’

The American Exchange Project, a nonprofit based in Boston, started the exchanges in 2021, sending 11 teens from Wellesley, Massachusetts and Palo Alto, California to Kilgore, Texas and Lake Charles, Louisiana. The students can express preferences, but their placement is ultimately determined by what will foster the most contrasting experience to their own communities. They stay with host families and participate in local town events, community service and meetings with local leaders. Later, the students take a turn hosting guests from out of state in their hometown.

“We realized that what America needed was the same amount of intercultural exchange programs within the country that existed going outside of the country,” David McCullough III, CEO of the American Exchange Project, told me. McCullough cofounded the project in partnership with Paul Solman of PBS NewsHour and McCullough’s former Yale professor, the late Robert Glauber, formerly undersecretary of U.S. Treasury.

“So, red to blue, rich to poor, urban to rural, culture to culture — we need to be sending kids to form friendships and educate themselves outside of the little bubbles they’re growing up in America to broaden their horizons,” McCullough said.

There is no strict admission criteria and the program is completely free — the founders believe the program should be a “public good.” The trip costs about $2,500 per student, which includes a stipend for the host family. Among the project’s sponsors are The Beth and Ravenel Curry Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, The Rockefeller Brothers Fund and The Hearthland Foundation.

Since its beginning, the project has fostered hundreds of exchanges in nearly 36 states. Just last summer close to 500 students went to 32 states. About 1,000 students participated in exchanges in the last four years. The program offers a kind of civic right of passage, McCullough said, during one of the most formative windows in a young person’s life, “after you’ve left the nest, but before you’ve gone off to whatever comes next.”

A life-changing trip

McCullough’s desire to understand America is part of his family lineage. He’s the son of a high school English teacher whose commencement speech entitled “You are Not Special” went viral in 2012, and the grandson of the late Pulitzer-prize winning historian David McCullough. At the turn of the 20th century, his mother’s family came to Massachusetts, fleeing Armenian genocide. “My mom’s side of the family was the American dream growing up, and Dad’s side of the family was kind of the American identity as told through the American story,” McCullough told me.

When McCullough was 22, he went on a grand adventure that changed his life. He was a student at Yale University, studying public education in America’s poor communities, when he realized he had little understanding of the problems that students and teachers were facing outside New Haven, Connecticut. So, in the tradition of John Steinbeck and Alexis de Tocqueville — although a more modern version of it — he hopped in his mom’s Mazda CX-9 with one big question about America: Why was the American dream that McCullough was the beneficiary of not reaching so many of the kids in America?

It was also the summer of 2016, and the pre-election climate was heating up as the country prepared for the presidential election, featuring Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. But amid the strident narratives in the news, on his trip, McCullough encountered something different.

In the places he visited — including Cotulla, Texas; Pine Ridge, South Dakota; and Cleveland, Ohio — he was invited to church, birthday parties and dinners, and he even got to join a Lakota sun dance ceremony. The eight-week trip coalesced into a rich portrait of an America he hadn’t seen before.

“Because I was curious and because I was kind of an eager beaver, it was a story of welcoming and unity and a demonstration of how many good people there are all across the country,” McCullough told me. “Not one of stone throwing and polarization and anger and hatred.”

McCullough went on to Cambridge University to get a degree in economic and social history, and shortly after returning to the United States, he began working on the American Exchange Project. “One of the benefits of exchange programs is that they tend to create durable relationships and charitable perspectives across wide divides,” he said.

‘Everyone lives in a bubble’

Afnan Hoch had never seen the Rocky Mountains until she got to the Salt Lake City airport. “I couldn’t stop photographing them,” said Hoch, who is from Portland, Maine and who spent the week of her exchange in American Fork last summer. Hoch’s family is from Djibouti in East Africa, and hadn’t travelled much, except to Africa.

She was struck by the dry heat and the icy glacial water in the mountain river where Hoch and her fellow exchange students went floating. She loved the craggy nature of Utah, but she missed Dunkin’ Donuts. Sometimes she felt “landlocked,” missing the ocean. “It was this realization that some people who live in Utah never got to experience the ocean being close to you,” said Hoch, 19, who is now a sophomore at the University of Southern Maine, studying psychology. She recalled one night in Utah, when, after a game of pickleball, she peppered the locals with questions about the Utah culture and The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

“What a lot of kids in Utah County think is that they live in a bubble, which is true,” said Peter Glahn, principal of American Fork High School, which participates in the American Exchange Project. “But what’s funny is that everyone lives in a bubble.”

Students are often placed in towns they’d never even heard of, and sometimes that they don’t even know how to pronounce, said DeLaina Tonks, executive director at Mountain Heights Academy, an online charter school serving 1,500 students in grades 7-12 all over the state of Utah. This past summer she led a group of 28 students: half students from Utah; the others, from all over the nation.

To get a taste of Utah, students went river rafting down the Provo River and to the Salt Flats. U.S. Rep. John Curtis spoke to the students and sponsored a dinner at J. Dawgs. The students toured the KSL Broadcast House and met with the local reporters and the West Jordan mayor. They saw a play at the Hale Center Theater and met with the playwright.

“A lot of the kids had never been to a play before, because the arts aren’t big where they are coming from,” Tonks told me.

Tonks was moved watching students who didn’t share the same cultural or political beliefs grow close and even cry at the end of the trip. “For me, this program really articulates a grassroots groundswell of a beautiful connection across the United States,” she said.

‘A more nuanced view’

During his week in Texas, Lorenzo Lisi also got to go to the Bar None Cowboy Church, which he at first found bizarre, but soon realized was a tight-knit, caring community of ranchers who were worshipping together. “It’s another culture of a church, and I found that really interesting,” Lisi said. Although he’s not religious, attending the service helped him see religion as a powerful glue behind a community. “I saw how churches were major drivers behind social causes,” he said. “It’s another way to see a very big part of American culture, which is religion.”

Although the trips don’t normally change students’ minds on big issues, engaging with their peers from other communities gives students “a more nuanced view of the other,” McCullough told me. Host parents, too, learn from the students: “We found that they come away with much more charitable and open-minded views because it’s kid to adult, not adult to adult.”

Before going to Texas, Lisi had been to Italy and New York City, but those trips revolved around visiting buildings, landmarks and museums. Only in Kilgore did Lisi feel he was getting to know a community, even if just hanging out with the local teens at Walmart. Their conversations about the “touchy” subjects — politics, religion, guns — were not awkward or emotionally tense. Instead, those conversations were “mindful” and “relaxed,” Lisi said. It may be because these conversations didn’t take place in a vacuum: there were shared experiences, genuine curiosity and ultimately, friendship.

“Even if we had disagreements in opinion, we still had agreements in values,” Lisi said. “When you see where somebody comes from — you realize you’re talking to a friend, not an opponent.”