Development comes with focusing on others and creating room for learning and growth.
The AFS is an Intercultural Programme and a global not-for-profit Network that provides a platform, network and intercultural learning opportunities.
The AFS is focused on helping young people develop the knowledge, skills and understanding needed to create a more just and peaceful world through capacity building and innovation.
Among its international exchange programmes, educational initiatives, volunteerism and advocacy, the AFS has empowered young people from all backgrounds with essential all-inclusive skills – and the passion for making a difference.
AFS Intercultural Programmes began as the American Ambulance Field Service, a volunteer ambulance corps created in April 1915 by A. Piatt Andrew. This timeline tells the story of the AFS drivers under the leadership of Andrew in World War I and Stephen Galatti in World War II – and how AFS was transformed from a wartime humanitarian aid organisation into a groundbreaking international secondary school exchange, volunteer, and intercultural learning organisation with a noble vision: to help build a more peaceful world by promoting understanding among cultures.
From the period of 1915 to date, the AFS has touched lives from all walks of life, educated, and created room for development and change. It has supported impact through the annual AFS Award for Young Global Citizens with US$10,000 for the first-place winner and two runners-up awarded US$2,500.
The AFS has produced thousands of skilled individuals through its various programmes and is in effect the first large-scale not-for-profit network with an impressive pool of great talent with exquisite leadership abilities.
A global survey conducted by the AFS alumni community, based on individual responses from over 10,500 former AFS participants across 80 countries, has evidently shown the effect an AFS experience can have on the lives and careers of its alumni while investigating the impact of secondary school mobility globally. It also includes real-life examples from other former participants, and the magic as well as the change these alumni have garnered by bringing their skills to their local communities – thereby furthering the AFS mission worldwide.
Every year, the AFS brings together young people from all walks of life to engage, learn and map out solutions to issues affecting their communities. With diverse programmes to pick from, the AFS provides other training opportunities for interested individuals; with a few of their conferences being held at the United Nations.
The Youth Assembly conference has been scheduled to take place in New York at the Convene Centre from 12th to 14th of August 2022, where hundreds of brilliant, like-minded young individuals are expected to meet and aim to reshape the world from different cultural perspectives.
Registration is currently open on the Youth Assembly website for interested persons with qualified skills and passion for change and growth.
Each year, individuals are selected to represent the Assembly as their Ambassador; and this year Ms. Juana A. Boateng will be represented as the Ambassador from Ghana, along with several Ambassadors from all over Africa with other young, passionate delegates.
Ms. Boateng is a youth activist, a communicator, an entrepreneur and a columnist. She is a young diplomat of Ghana (YDG) alumni, a President Obama young African leadership initiative (YALI RLC) alumni, as well as the former Alumni association networking and events Chair. She founded the Ghana chapter of Students for Sensible Drug Policy (Ssdp). Through YDG, she participated in the 2017 Youth Assembly at the United Nations with Seth Owusu Mante of IPPG Africa as delegates.
She believes in setting a large table for everyone to be enabled to help development by contributing their quota toward social and economic growth in society.
The registration portal https://www.youthassembly.org/ has been opened, and interested individuals are encouraged to apply to be a part of a global network redefining, creating and above all reshaping the whole world in a ‘Daring’ way.
