La Fundación AFS
La Fundación AFS assiste a AFS internacional y sa sus afiliados mundiales en todos los aspectos de intercambios interculturales.
Su tarea principal es garantizar la existencia y la continuidad de la red AFS. Esto incluye preservar la herencia que consiste en las marcas de l’AFS y los archivos históricos y tambien promover una mejor comprensión de la historia de la organización que empezó durante la Primera Guerra Mundial.
The AFS Foundation was established on July 13th, 2004 in Zurich to protect the AFS Legacy. The AFS International Board of Trustees endowed the foundation and appointed the first Foundation Board.
At the constituting meeting that took place the very same day Ward Chamberlin stated “the Foundation is another important step to establish the AFS global community ”.
He further noted:
It is fitting that today we are establishing an AFS Foundation, on the day of the fortieth anniversary of the death of Stephen Galatti, who founded the AFS programs and whose inspiration has been the basis of all we have accomplished with the AFS global network in the years since his death. We dedicate this Foundation to his memory and to the worldwide struggle for peace to which he devoted his life.
Ward Chamberlin
Objetivos de la Fundación AFS
In accordance with its charter the AFS Foundation
- assists AFS international and its affiliates worldwide in promoting intercultural exchanges
- endeavours to preserve the legacy of AFS and The American Field Service
- holds the AFS name and logo and related intellectual property and licenses them.
Actividades de la Fundación
The AFS Foundation was established in 2004. One of its main goals is to preserve the legacy of AFS.
To that effect, the AFS Foundation has acquired the APA Papers from the A. Piatt Andrew estate in 2007, preserving some important documents from the early period of AFS.
Between 2012 and 2014, the AFS Foundation has created a virtual museum to document the history of AFS and let more than 400’000 former AFS exchange students, as well as their host families, revive their memories. The virtual museum consists of individual rooms (in 3D) for each decade, up to the nineteen-nineties. Historical items placed in the room gove access to picture galleries, video clips and audio recordings. An extensive library contains thousands of documents and books. The Virtual Museum went online in November 2014 and was presented to the AFS community during the Centennial World Congress in Paris. It is an ongoing project.