The American Exchange Project Is Creating Cross-Country Friendships
Many Americans have never traveled outside of their own state. The American Exchange Project hopes to change that
By
Mar 11, 2025
Describe the problem you’re addressing in five words.
Cultural divisions tearing Americans apart.
Describe your solution in 10 words.
Fund students to visit an American community unlike their own.
Describe your progress in 15 words.
We’ve helped nearly 1,000 students across 36 states build lifelong connections with each other.
In the summer of 2016, David McCullough III, a rising senior at Yale, borrowed his mom’s Mazda CX-9, leaving their leafy Boston suburb to drive 7,100 miles across the country. He spent two months in three communities: Cotulla, Texas; South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Indian Reservation; and Cleveland, Ohio. While each town was a world away from his own, the people he met, befriended, and learned from “changed his life,” he says.
The experience inspired him to team up with Paul Solman, an economics correspondent at PBS NewsHour, and Robert Glauber, a Harvard Business School professor, to create the American Exchange Project: a-first-of-its-kind domestic exchange program that sends high school students on a free weeklong trip to an American hometown vastly different from their own. The goal is simple: to help bridge divides. Over the last four summers, nearly 1,000 students have traveled on 150 exchanges across 36 states, many of them leaving their home state for the first time.
The organization hopes to eventually make a week in a different town as common to the high school experience as the prom. “Because when we reach out,” McCullough says, “We begin to understand in the end and underneath it all, there is no ‘other,’ just one big ‘us.’”
By the numbers
22 David McCullough III’s age when he set out on the cross-country road trip that inspired the American Exchange Project. 7,100 the number of miles David McCullough drove in his mom’s Mazda CX-9. 50% of 2024 American Exchange Project travelers had never been to another state. 54% of young people in America have never seen a cow in real life, according to a recent survey. 55 hometowns across the country will participate in the American Exchange Project in 2025. 400 the population of Riggins, Idaho: the program’s smallest host town. $3 million the amount of a new grant from Carnegie Corporation of New York to support the expansion of the American Exchange Project to all 50 states.
The American Exchange Project is supported by Carnegie Corporation of New York. Learn more about the project at www.americanexchangeproject.org
