A Νew International Exchange Opportunity for Greek Students Supported by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation
Education is one of the four primary pillars of SNF’s grant-making activity, of which a particular focus is promoting international collaboration, knowledge-sharing, and exchange of ideas.
The Foundation supports ongoing, multi-year programs to provide Greek professionals in health and journalism the opportunity to learn from the fields’ best practitioners in the United States, as well as to provide scholars of the Greek diaspora the opportunity to return to Greek institutions, helping divert the flow of a brain drain into a current of global intellectual circulation.
International exchange can have significant impacts for professionals and academics, but for people the age of secondary school students, an international exchange experience can have a profoundly transformative effect, with positive downstream consequences over the course of a lifetime. With support from a new SNF grant, AFS Intercultural Programs’ Global Citizen Scholarship Program will give 50 high school students from Greece the opportunity to spend a semester on an international exchange, developing cross-cultural literacy and fluency. The intention is to give Greek students who would not otherwise have experiences abroad the chance of one, and participants will be selected from lower-income and underserved communities.
SNF is providing support for a three-year pilot program, and AFS hopes to continue the program after the pilot phase concludes.