Since 2013, through our regional body called the Alianza Latinoamericana para el Aprendizaje Intercultural (ALEI), AFS has enabled over 400 teachers, school counselors, and administrators to experience an international mobility exchange. The program Educadores con Causa (Educators with Purpose) provides scholarships to educators with the goal of developing intercultural learning and global competence. Participants travel for 10-15 days to another country and live with a host family while shadowing their counterparts in a host country. In this way participants experience different cultures, professional practices, and teaching methods that they can bring back to their own communities.
The lasting impact of an intercultural experience
To facilitate the scholarship, our regional body ALEI and national organization in Latin America organizations invest in the program to the best of their abilities. As a result, the program is usually a full scholarship for educators, covering all their expenses and making the program more accessible and inclusive. This commitment and investment into schools and educators has already paid dividends for AFS: numerous AFS members of ALEI now have alumni of Educadores con Causa as highly engaged members of their networks. Alumni of the Educadores con Causa program are now active volunteers, doing everything from organizing educational orientations to serving on national boards at different AFS organizations.
Expanding exchange programs to local communities
In some cases, alumni of Educadores con Causa have taken their enthusiasm and motivation for AFS and intercultural learning to the next level and have organized their own exchange programs in collaboration with AFS. In Guatemala, recently two principals of rural schools, Colegio Integral Mesoamericano, Patzicía and Proyecto CETI, San Martín Jilotepeque, returned from their exchange highly motivated to bring intercultural learning to their communities. They started hosting international students and educators by motivating the school community to become host families. They didn’t want to just bring the world to their communities, they also wanted to bring their students to the world through mobility opportunities. For rural Mayan Kaqchiquel youth in Guatemala the costs associated with a normal exchange opportunity are prohibitive. However, these principals saw an opportunity to make an exchange a reality for their students and collaborated with AFS Guatemala to make a program possible.
By providing scholarships for the AFS exchange program to these two schools, going on an exchange program suddenly became possible for many youth in Chimaltenango. In 2025, 10 students from Colegio Integral Mesoamericano and Proyecto CETI traveled on an AFS exchange from rural Guatemala to the Dominican Republic, Colombia, and Panama for six weeks. The students were able to have a transformative intercultural experience through the determination and passion of two school leaders – which was generated by the scholarships received through the Educadores con Causa program. In 2026, an additional nearby school has joined the program, and 12 students plan to go on exchanges to the same locations, as well as Costa Rica.
Investing in intercultural learning and global citizenship education opportunities for educators has a ripple effect. As the program Educadores con Causa has demonstrated, teachers and school leaders also bring lots of benefits to their communities back home after going on a mobility exchange. Not only are these alumni likely to contribute to the AFS Network and promote Global Citizenship Education locally, they are also actively working in creative and collaborative ways to make intercultural experiences possible for their students, regardless of their realities. Oftentimes all anyone needs is just the opportunity to have an experience, and then they take it and run – opening up a world of possibilities.