The Benjamin Franklin Transatlantic Fellows Initiative

The program

The Benjamin Franklin Transatlantic Fellows Initiative (BFTF) – named after the legendary early American statesman and diplomat – is the first State Department youth program created to focus exclusively on U.S.-European relations, and the first to involve young people from across Europe and Eurasia. The initiative’s vision includes channeling efforts of various public and private sector organizations and funding in order to launch an even wider range of programs for European and American successor generations.

The students, aged 16-19, spend three weeks in the United States working on civic education, leadership development and community activism. The participants consist of thirty-five European and Eurasian teenagers from thirty-two countries, ranging from Norway to Kazakhstan, along with ten American teenagers. Participants must demonstrate a strong interest in learning more about the transatlantic relationship, the role of a free press in a democracy, and civic participation.

Only winners of the Know America contest can be nominated to participate in the Benjamin Franklin Summer Institute. Bartosz Borowski from Juliusz Slowacki High School in Elbląg is the winner of Know America 2011. He will participate in the program July 2-29, 2011 in Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

The purpose

The goal of the BFTF Initiative is to foster connections among American and European youth and help raise awareness of their shared values and cultural ties.
“This program aims to empower the younger generation of Americans and Europeans to face global challenges in the 21st Century together,” said Allan Louden, director of the BFTFI, who is an associate professor of communications and director of debate at Wake Forest University. “We hope to achieve this by improving the understanding the participants have of the political and cultural environments in each others’ countries.”

The experience

At Wake Forest University, the students in the 2006 program participated in three workshops with university professors. The students in the program spent their workshops examining the development of constitutions in the United States and Europe (“Comparative Constitutionalism”); exploring the role of Internet tools in public discourse (“Media Criticism in the Age of Internet”); and experimenting with public debate as a way to bridge differences.

In order to have a chance to experience American life first-hand, the students stayed in the homes of families near the university campus for a weekend. As part of the program, the students also started their own blogs – a convenient and technologically up-to-date way to exchange information, discuss cultural differences, relate experiences, present points of view and comment on what others have to say.