Sebastian Porsche:

Hello everyone and welcome to today’s conversation with Noah Adams – a 23-year-old-student from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, who just recently finished his global studies bachelor in Chicago. He’s been a volunteer for the international and nonprofit-organization AFS for over five years, which is a global student exchange network that aims to empower young people from all backgrounds with essential global skills and the passion for making a difference. Tonight, I am very much looking forward to hearing more about his experiences as an AFS volunteer and the importance of building a genuine community and bringing people together. Hello Noah and thanks so much for being here.

Noah Adams:

Yeah, thanks for having me, Sebastian. Excited for this conversation.

Sebastian Porsche:

So, let me just start off with asking – how did you get involved with AFS and how has that experience been like for you? Have you also gone on exchange yourself as well?

Noah Adams:

Yeah, going on exchange was actually the first way I got involved, uh, in high school. I came across the congress Bundestag youth exchange program which is a US and German government co-sponsored program that sends about 250 young people from each country on exchange to the other country each year. And so when I went abroad with that. There’s a few different administering organizations, but AFS is the one for the northeast region of the US and so I went abroad with AFS and then I came back and after that – great experience. Definitely one of the highlights of my life, honestly – I wanted to give back and try to help other people also have an as great experience as I did and so that’s what really inspired me to get involved and become a volunteer with AFS.

Sebastian Porsche:

That sounds like such an amazing experience and I’m sure that after spending a year abroad and having that as you called it “highlight” in your life, I feel like becoming a volunteer and having the opportunity to share those experiences with others and help others through their journey kind of helps you to keep that experience alive in a way right? So what does it actually mean to be an AFS volunteer and what are some of the things you can do as a volunteer?

Noah Adams:

Certainly, so I think being an AFS volunteer can mean a lot of different things. You can help volunteer with the national organization or the international organization and sort of just deal with some of them maybe more bureaucratic or behind the scenes tasks, that have to go on to facilitate these exchanges. And then of course there are many local volunteers, and I think the main job local volunteers have, or the biggest job, is being a liaison. And when you’re liaison, you’re really – you get assigned to a student, or if it’s a busy year it could be a couple students. But you have to check in with each of your assigned students every month and make sure that their year is going well and then, if they’re having any issues with their host family, you have to check in on that too. And then some other tasks would be organizing the, like ah, group events that happen once in the fall and once in the spring. And maybe smaller things throughout the year. And then also just trying to find host families to host these students. That’s obviously a good bit of work. Each student stays with the family that is in effect volunteering, ah, to take and host that student for the year. So that’s another big task.

Sebastian Porsche:

So definitely lots of different and interesting things to do as an AFS volunteer, but they also sound very challenging, from finding host families, to organizing events and even being that special contact person between the host family and the student must be a great responsibility and must take some great communication skills as well. So I’d really like to know now what kind of things you personally have done for AFS, what you would like to do and what were some of the challenges that you faced along the way?

Noah Adams:

Yeah, I think – So what I did as a volunteer was primarily focused on writing bio. So when each student applies, they submit a long application. But then the host family really just reads a paragraph or two about them. And so I was focused on condensing these really thorough applications into a small space. Uhm, but I think a challenge for me based on that was that I really wanted to be a liaison, actually. And having been on exchange myself I thought I’d be really well set up to understand some of the challenges an exchange student might be hosting. And my family has hosted a few exchange students as well. So I thought I also had a good understanding of what it’s like to host. Uh, unfortunately though in the US I don’t believe you can be a liaison until you are 21 years old. And so even though I was back at 17 and really excited, I had to wait a few years and then the pandemic hit and so exchange students weren’t really coming during the height of the pandemic. Although I think now it’s getting back to normal. So that put a bit of a temporary roadblock in my desire to become a volunteer and that’s definitely been a challenge. But hopefully in the next year or two I can, ah, work to, ah, accomplish that goal that I’ve had.

Sebastian Porsche:

Yes, that would be awesome I would love to see you do that so good luck for that and now thinking about AFS volunteerism on a broader scale. Why do you think AFS volunteers are so important for really shaping that amazing global network as we know it today an d why are especially young volunteers so important for keeping that community together?

Noah Adams:

Yeah, this is a great question. I think the volunteers in general are so important because they really carry the organization honestly. I think there’s a small staff of paid people who work on it full time in New York. But most of the, ah, people making AFS happen or volunteers across the world, and I think that’s a really powerful thing from an organization, AFS actually got started in World War One with volunteer ambulance drivers in Europe. And then after seeing the atrocities in both world wars, those same volunteers decided they needed to create a program to not just help out once war broke out, but to actually try and prevent war from happening. And so I think that’s a really inspiring mission to me and has definitely been a legacy that I’ve tried to work to carry forward. My own grandpa actually fought in World War Two and voluntarily signed up to do so and so, just this mentality of trying to prevent, uhm, as many future wars as possible. Although that’s probably never going to be zero is, is definitely a mission I’m passionate about. Uhm, and what was the second part of your question again?

Sebastian Porsche:

The second part of the question was why you think especially young people are so important for building that strong AFS community and also connecting with the exchange students? Because here you have these exchange students being supported by volunteers that are almost the same age as them. So what so you think the power of that is?

Noah Adams:

Yeah, I think the power of that is just that, uhm, having a volunteer who somewhat recently got back from an AFS exchange year and is a somewhat similar age, I think can understand the challenges a bit better. Uhm, I know lots of the volunteers in the US are a bit older and more experienced and that has certainly lots of advantages as well. But I think especially with the prevalence of technology and technologies, like what we’re using now to record this interview, and video calls and all these things just didn’t exist even twenty or thirty years ago. And so having a, a liaison who had to navigate that while they were abroad, I think really helps. Because ultimately you are probably going to be video calling your family which would have been discouraged doing ten or fifteen years ago. But in today’s hyperconnected world, that’s just not a realistic expectation. And so I think having someone who’s, uhm, more able to negotiate the difficulties of balancing that without cutting it off completely and, and setting realistic expectations is really important. And there are certainly plenty of older volunteers who are able to do that as well. But I think having someone who lived through it, ah, definitely helps out.

Sebastian Porsche:

Yeah definitely I think that’s what makes AFS so special, it’s not just having the experience of going abroad and living in another country, but also being embraced into this amazing network of young people supporting other young people and all kind of sharing the same experiences. Now I do want to move on from AFS and dive deeper into your personal journey and I wanted to ask if there’s any other community or volunteer work that you’ve been doing or that you plan to do in the future.

Noah Adams:

Yeah, definitely. So I think I’m interested in finding ways to volunteer and teach ice skating. That’s something that I was trying to do in Chicago last year but once again due to the pandemic that had been closed off. I think a more, ah, recent passion for community building came from the time I spent studying abroad in Seoul in South Korea this past fall. I lived in a co-living house and the founder of that was really big on building intentional communities around a specific goal. So, could be living together harmoniously or it could be having a co-working space where all are trying to be productive and support each other and whatever your career goals are. And so I think for me, being in Chicago more recently this year, lots of my friends from university had moved away. So it almost felt like a fresh start, even though I was somewhat familiar with the city. And this lined up well with a friend of mine who’s wrote a book recently on how to host better cocktail parties and really bring people together. And I’m definitely someone who’s always liked making introductions. Ah, but I thought this would be a really neat idea to meet some neighbors and try to build a sense of community in Chicago. And so I’ve been focused on doing that and the parties have a bit more structure than usual parties. They’ll have name tags, icebreakers and things like that. And it’s not too much but it just really gets people moving around and not sort of finding a group and then staying there all night, but really talking to different people. And I think that that’s just a really interesting way to go about it and then, ah, the other trick is I’ll actually host them on weeknights on Mondays, Tuesdays or Wednesdays, because people are less busy. And keep them to exactly two hours. So, when the two hour markets, I make a little, ah, blow on my harmonica and then tell people they’ve got to leave but it keeps it short and sweet.

Sebastian Porsche:

That sounds so fun I would love to join those parties someday. But I’m just asking myself with all these amazing things you’re doing and also being a student and working, everybody’s just going through their everyday lives, so what’s your motivation to do volunteer work and why do think it’s so important to bring people together and building those genuine and string communities?

Noah Adams:

Yeah, I think the motivation is a bit too bold. I mean, with volunteering in general I feel like I’ve been really lucky to have a lot of great experiences in life. And I really want to give back and try to create similar opportunities for others. I also think that we have a lot of challenges facing the world. I mean we have many advances in science and technology over previous generations but we also have, maybe bigger threats, like climate change. And for the first time in a really long time, seeing a major war on European soil and just different things. And then certainly plenty of other challenges in all parts of the world too. And so that’s part of it. I also think the part of it is – we’re just coming out of this pandemic and I think that that was a time where people were really isolated, honestly. And technology, well, can enable us to stay connected. Oftentimes makes people feel more lonely and disconnected as well. Through social media it can have sort of the opposite effect to what’s intended. And so I think just creating a space, especially with the parties where people can interact in person and, uhm, meet new people and just encouraging people to socialize is really big. I know I listened to a podcast recently on the importance of talking to strangers. And the research was then in the US so it could be somewhat culturally specific, but at least in the research they did here everyone, or most people, think that a stranger wouldn’t enjoy being approached to talk if you’re waiting in line or on the train. But actually whenever there was an experiment having people do that. And the group of people that spoke to strangers were happier. Both the people initiating that exchange as well as the people on the receiving end. And it could be a small conversation about the weather or, uhm, anything like that. But just fostering that human connection I think is really important to bridging lots of the divides that we face in today’s societies.

Sebastian Porsche:

I couldn’t agree more, and I think what you’re doing is so important and so amazing so please keep doing it. And as a last question I wanted to think about that global perspective that you’ve gained at only 23 years old, from being an exchange student yourself in Germany, to becoming an AFS volunteer and also living in Korea, what has been your biggest takeaway from all of these experiences that you would like to share with listeners?

Noah Adams:

Yeah, I think the takeaway is just not to take global society for granted. I mean I think I was someone who was always big on putting in the work to maintain those connections that I had been able to build with different parts of the world. But obviously Covid made a lot of that tricky and I think really showed how, uhm, isolated countries can become overnight, really. And so I think, just as travel is reopening and the chance to see new places and meet new people is, is coming forth again. I think really just encouraging people to, to take advantage of that. And, uhm, globalization has had a lot of unintended side effects and the benefits of it have definitely not been shared equally. But I think there’s a lot of room to build a better world for all of us. And I think that as we get the chance to maybe get back more to some sense of normalcy, although there’s certainly still plenty of ramifications from the pandemic. I think I would just really encourage people to work towards that better future.

Sebastian Porsche:

What a great message and I’d like to end it on that note. Noah, thank you so much for this interview and for all the amazing that you’re doing. I wish you all the best.

Noah Adams:

Thanks for having me, Sebastian. Definitely got me thinking and enjoyed talking through some of these questions with you.