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A few months before the 2024 election, I was attending a get-out-the-vote postcard party when one of the attendees mentioned that her daughter worked at an organization called the American Exchange Project (AEP) whose mission is to bridge the nation’s political divide by sending recent high school graduates on a free, week-long trip to a community in the US that is very different from their own. She also mentioned that several Palo Alto High School grads had been AEP participants. While the premise sounded intriguing, it wasn’t something I felt compelled to investigate.
But then we elected our current President, and I, like so many others, began searching for something, anything, that might help mitigate our ever-widening political chasm. In that context, I thought of AEP and whether it achieved its objectives. To find out, I interviewed four AEP participants, all recent Palo Alto High School grads, about their experience.
Athya Paramesh’s AEP destination was Flowood, Mississippi; Eloise Dumas traveled to Lincoln, Nebraska; Maddie Castro headed off to Little Rock, Arkansas, while Lorenzo Lisi ventured to Kilgore, Texas.
Each of these students had different reasons for signing up for AEP. Athya learned about it from Cait Drewes, her Paly history teacher and an AEP exchange manager, who framed AEP as a way to overcome the assumptions we make about people who are different from us. Eloise liked AEP’s mission and was intrigued by the notion of visiting a red state. Maddie and Lorenzo were simply curious and thought they’d regret it if they passed up a free trip.
Regardless of their motivations, each AEP participant interviewed returned with different perspectives than they’d had before their trip.
How AEP works
Any high school senior who is on track to graduate from an AEP partner high school––a high school that has signed up to be part of the AEP network––is eligible to participate in AEP. In October of their senior year students sign up and answer questions about their own experiences like whether they’ve lived in a big city or on a farm. (AEP already knows the demographics of the towns students visit.) Based on their responses, students are assigned a hometown that is significantly different from their own.
The summer after they graduate, students travel to their assigned hometowns where they stay for a week, living with host families and participating in cultural and community-based activities—think visiting a cattle ranch in Texas or, for students visiting Palo Alto, touring Google’s Mountain View campus—that are emblematic of that community. That same summer each student hosts AEP visitors for a week-long visit to their hometown.
Paly became an AEP partner school in 2020. Since then, more than 80 Paly students have participated in the program, including 28 students who will travel this summer.
Befriending MAGAs
According to a 2024 poll from Johns Hopkins University, almost half of U.S. voters think members of the opposing party are “downright evil.” Changing those attitudes is at the heart of AEP’s mission. As AEP founder David McCullough III said in a 2024 interview, “We live in a massive and diverse country and unless we can learn to socialize and connect with people who are different from us, our democratic project is really going to be in trouble.”
The idea behind AEP is that students connect on a human level, not a political level. That said, politics often comes up.
For Eloise, a first-year student at the University of Southern California, participating in AEP meant spending time with a student who was “openly MAGA.”
“I was expecting her to be hate-criming people,” Eloise admits. “I mean, if you vote for someone who’s openly racist and hateful, I would expect his followers to be perpetuating those beliefs,” adding that she also expected that student to think that Eloise’s lifestyle was “shocking and horrifying.”
But Eloise and the MAGA supporter became friends, not close friends, but more than casual acquaintances who still are in touch on social media.
“I saw some humanity in someone who was very, very MAGA and that was good for me,” Eloise says.
Reconciling conflicting viewpoints
Political discussions aren’t built into the AEP experience. Still, they do happen, often in response to students recounting personal experiences.
Maddie, a second-year student at Northeastern University, recalled a conversation about guns in which an AEP student from San Angelo, Texas described witnessing his friend get shot. The student felt that, if he’d been carrying a gun at the time, he might have been able to protect his friend and save his friend’s life.
“Seeing the different reasoning behind everyone’s arguments and realizing that everyone’s argument made sense, and that all of these things could be true at once, made me realize that people have different needs and different desires even though their end goal is the same, which is to be safe,” Maddie says. “I don’t know if it really changed my perspective on whether I would want to own a gun. But it definitely made me empathize with the friend that I had made.”
During his stay in Kilgore, a 13,000-person town in East Texas, Lorenzo, a first-year student at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, also talked with fellow students about guns. Lorenzo shot clay pigeons outside a large ranch home, then went to the police station where he shot an automatic, activities in keeping with AEP’s philosophy of exposing kids to activities they’ve never done before. After visiting the police station, Lorenzo mentioned that he thought it might be frightening to live in a place where almost everyone carried a gun. The Kilgore students responded by explaining why they believe guns are necessary.
“They had nuanced arguments that were based on their own experiences. You can’t challenge their experiences, but you can talk about them, certainly, and you can understand where they’re coming from…We basically ended the conversation saying pretty much ‘I don’t know the answer, but it’s worth exploring options and being more open-minded than we’re used to being’.”
Grappling with teen mental health and teen pregnancy
In addition to the conversation about guns, Lorenzo found himself discussing two other issues he hadn’t expected to come up: teen mental health, a hot topic in Palo Alto, and teen pregnancy, a concern in Kilgore.
It was hearing Kilgore students talk about their high school experience that led to a discussion about making high school less stressful for kids in Palo Alto.
“In Palo Alto there’s insane pressure in high school to really work your head off so you get into an amazing school, and that’s your idea of success,” Lorenzo says. He compares that to what it’s like for Kilgore kids who tend to go to college close to home so they can stay connected to their community and who study what they love as opposed to placing a high priority on choosing a high-paying career like engineering.
Kilgore students’ concerns about the high incidence of teen pregnancy led to a discussion of Kilgore High School’s sex education program—which focuses exclusively on abstinence—and how more comprehensive sex education classes might help mitigate that problem.
Experiencing the South
Athya, who visited Flowood, Mississippi, was hosted by two students—both of whom were Black. Athya’s exchange manager, a teacher at the local high school, also was Black. As a result, Athya was immersed in the experiences of Flowood’s Black community.
In reflecting on her trip, Athya says that she was most impressed by students’ profound knowledge of local history, commitment to advocating for issues they cared about, and willingness to help other community members (much more so than is the case in Palo Alto). But she also saw firsthand the segregation that continues to define what it’s like to be Black in Flowood.
“We were driving through downtown Flowood. It was a super-bustling downtown with a bowling alley and bars and people eating in restaurants, but everyone was white. Then we drove less than five minutes. We crossed the railroad tracks, and then suddenly the houses got so much more dilapidated,” Athya recalls. “It was just a very clear delineation of race.”
Athya also realized how the current political climate affects Flowood residents in very different ways than it affects people in Palo Alto. For example, one of the Flowood students mentioned how a good friend had gotten pregnant and how traumatized the friend was when she had to travel out-of-state to get an abortion.
“I was devastated when Roe v. Wade got overturned, but the truth of the matter is it doesn’t really impact me personally. Hearing that story and really truly understanding what it meant for people to be living under this new reality made me look at my responses to these issues in a different way,” Athya says.
Re-evaluating Palo Alto
During their trips, some students started seeing Palo Alto differently than they had before they left, especially when it came to how comparatively wealthy Palo Alto is. Eloise describes coming to that realization this way: “I was being driven from the Omaha airport to Lincoln, and then the group leader says, ‘We’re about to drive through the really fancy part of Lincoln.’ And I just kept waiting for the really fancy part of Lincoln because it looked like a very normal part of Palo Alto.”
Eloise also was struck by the wealth disparity when she visited the Kawasaki motorcycle factory which employs a lot of high school kids who work overnight shifts and then go to high school the next day, something that you just don’t see in Palo Alto.
“Everyone says that Palo Alto is a bubble, which as someone living in Palo Alto, I knew intellectually. But then when you go somewhere else, you really realize that living in Palo Alto is a very unusual way to live,” Eloise says.
After observing Lincoln’s large population of Muslim, Black, and Latino residents, Eloise’s view of Palo Alto’s diversity also changed. “If you’d told me that Lincoln, Nebraska was more diverse than Palo Alto, I’d be like, ‘no way’,” she says. “But that’s what I found.”
Mission accomplished?
In 2021, twenty students nationwide participated in AEP. This year, more than 600 students from 55 high schools in 28 states plus Washington D.C will be part of the program. Founder McCullough III’s goal is to make AEP as “typical for the American high school experience as the prom.”
A study conducted by a Harvard Kennedy School research team found that students who participate in AEP became substantially less biased towards those who view the country through a different ideological lens, developed a greater willingness and enthusiasm about interacting in the future with peers with disagreeing perspectives, and grew more hopeful about the future of the United States.
Students’ responses to their AEP experiences are in line with that research. Maddie, for example, says that “My takeaway is that all places in the US are a lot more similar than I would have expected and that the students are too.”
Lorenzo goes one step further. “I understand that the people in Kilgore don’t vote the same way as me, but our values are the same. Everybody is family oriented. Everybody values just being a good person. Everybody is just trying to do the best they can for the people around them.”
Postscript
Over the past several months, I’ve been surprised by how many otherwise open-minded people have told me that Trump voters are terrible people who they have no interest in engaging with. I don’t share that sentiment (which is one reason I chose to write this story). That said, at this point in my life, I can’t imagine spending a week hanging out with the locals in East Texas. But I’m also not a recent high school grad. As Paly high school teacher Cait Drewes points out, high school graduates are poised for their next adventure—eager to connect, challenge their assumptions, and grow. After interviewing each of these incredibly articulate and insightful students, I’m convinced that while the American Exchange Project isn’t a cure-all for the hatred and mistrust coursing through our country, it’s a strategy well worth continuing.
