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The Summer Institute for Youth, a project under the Benjamin Franklin Transatlantic Fellows Initiative, is a three-week U.S.-based summer institute for 40 teenagers aged 16-19 from Europe, Eurasia, and the United States. The Institute took place during the first three weeks of July 2006 at the campus of Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, North Carolina, U.S.A.
In 2006 the program focused on civic education, leadership development, and community activism as a way to unite young adults across the Atlantic Ocean.
The initiative aimed to foster relationships among the younger generation of Europeans and Americans in order to advance the global freedom agenda, to serve as a basis to build strong links and awareness of shared values, and to enable youth to face together the challenges of global circumstances in the 21st Century.
In 2008, two Polish students participated in the Benjamin Franklin program: “Know America” contest winners Martyna Nełka, who now studies political science at Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, and Krzysztof Jankowski, a student of law at the University of Wrocław. The 2007 participant was Monika Krupa, who is currently a student of theater at Jagiellonian University. 2006 representative Miłosz Zieliński from Iława is now a student at the University of Warsaw’s Institute of International Relations.
For more information on the Know America contest, please visit www.know-america.org
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.
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.
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