Hosting Opportunities
Share in the experience!
One of the most enjoyable and powerful aspects of a sister city exchange is the host family experience. Most visitors share that, in fact, this is the highlight of their whole trip! Host families are also amazed at how easy it is to form a bond with their guests, even if they do not share a common language. Compassion and curiosity thread us together as human beings and melt away perceived barriers. No other travel experience can compare to being taken in as part of a family and no other way of relating can teach us so much about one another.
Host a visitor from Takeo, Japan!
There are frequent opportunities to host sister city visitors from Takeo, Japan, as Sebastopol World Friends offers a middle school exchange program every two years. During the hosting phase in the first year, Japanese middle school students stay with Sebastopol student ambassadors and their families for approximately 10 days. (To find out more about this opportunity for students, please refer to our Takeo Programs page.)
As part of this program, we select host families for the chaperones accompanying the students, and often for a group of adult visitors from Takeo as well. Although the chaperones are with the student group for the duration of their entire stay, the adult delegation from Takeo generally stays a shorter length of time, usually 5-7 days.
In addition to this regular exchange, there are occasionally other visits from Takeo city officials or adult groups from our sister city and SWF is happy to help find hosts for those groups as well. Find out more at takeo@sebastopolwf.org.
Host a visitor from Chyhyryn, Ukraine!
We also offer regular opportunities to host visitors from our sister city in Ukraine. Sebastopol World Friends is proud to take part almost every year in the US Open World Program, a congressionally sponsored program that brings young emerging leaders from post Soviet Union countries to the US to experience accountable governance and democracy. These delegations are typically small in number (5-7 adults) and stay for an intensive two-week program of educational and cultural outings, facilitated by SWF. All our delegates are from Chyhyryn or the nearby region.
In past years, we have also hosted high school and college students and other visitors from Chyhyryn and hope, with enough community involvement and enthusiasm, to create other exchange opportunities in the future. Find out more at chyhyryn@sebastopolwf.org.