School & College Tours

Learning outside the classroom

Bring your course alive by meeting the people on-the-ground working to make a difference!

Our short-term programs (1-3 weeks) engage a range of contemporary global issues, offering an alternative to study abroad that can be tailored to the particular interests of your students.

We draw on our far-reaching networks cultivated across 30 years of solidarity work promoting social, economic, and environmental justice to put together meaningful programs that offer unparalleled engagement with issues and key actors. Through formal and informal meetings, participants connect with organizers, journalists, scientists, professors, doctors, writers, artists, environmentalists, politicians and representatives who are catalyzing change in their communities. These conversations offer the opportunity to learn the many histories that compose our collective story — including ones that fall outside the traditional U.S narrative. (Read this reflection from a Spelman student who traveled with us to Cuba).

We have developed trips for college students and professors that tackle topics like revolution and change, the non-profit industrial complex, the role of fair trade and cooperative movements in sustainable development and food sovereignty, the local impacts of U.S foreign policy and corporate globalization, racial justice, indigenous rights, women’s rights and more.

Participants come away with a deeper appreciation for the ways in which global forces work across borders, connecting our local fates like never before.  They also gain an understanding for the diverse ways that people have resisted, organized, and advocated for more equitable, sustainable, and inclusive societies. This understanding is the foundation upon which solidarity networks are built, and it is our hope that they might enable participants to more critically examine and act in their own communities.

Below are a few examples of past trips, email realitytours@globalexchange.org for a sample itinerary:

• Haiti: Beyond Disaster
• Venezuela: Behind the Headlines
• Cuba: Changing Course for Changing Times
• Palestine: Fair Trade in the West Bank
• Panama: Afro-latino History and Culture
• Indigenous Resilience in Chiapas
• Afghanistan: Women Making Change
• Ecuador: Environmental Justice in the Andes and the Amazon