December 23, 2024
An exchange of hope
David McCullough III ’13 aims to rekindle Americans’ sense of communityby Allyson Irish
Before David McCullough III ’13 entered his senior year at Yale University, he took a summer road trip to Texas, South Dakota, and Ohio. These locations were “a world away from the leafy Boston suburb I grew up in,” McCullough explains, and the experiences he had meeting with ranchers, preachers, and teachers changed the course of his life.
The trip opened his eyes to people and places vastly different from what he was used to, and McCullough was intrigued. Working with his graduate school professor Paul Solman, he dove into a research project to better understand the demographics and disparities.
What the pair discovered was that many of the problems facing the United States can be boiled down to one simple fact: we don’t know one another. So began the American Exchange Project (AEP), which McCullough co-founded in 2019.
Above, David McCullough III '13 speaks at the Masters of Scale conference in fall 2024. (Photo courtesy LinkedIn)
“The whole theory of change at AEP is based on the notion of social capital, that your relationships matter enormously to your outcomes in life,” McCullough says.
AEP developed a unique program for high school seniors, pairing them with other U.S. teens across factors of difference, such as income levels, race, religion, political beliefs, and location. The program culminates in a week-long summer exchange.
Thus far, AEP has run close to 150 exchanges with 1,000 students in 70 towns across 40 states. Early data show that this approach works.
“We see that kids are much more likely to hang out with people who disagree with them after the experience,” McCullough says. “We also see that kids say they have faith in fellow Americans and they are more optimistic about the future of the country.”
A teacher at Bishop Seabury Academy in Lawrence, Kansas, Sonja Czarnecki ’94 has been an AEP exchange manager since 2022. Czarnecki is amazed at the transformations she has seen among participating students. The program, she says, directly addresses one of the root problems of societal polarization.
“We are fed a steady stream of content online that tends to confirm our biases, trigger the amygdala, and that generally reinforces our own prejudices,” she says.
The skills that AEP emphasizes—active listening, finding compromise, and looking for common ground—are much more than “nice to have.”
McCullough is excited by the success of the program thus far and says he’d like these types of experiences to be “as normal a high school experience as a prom.” The focus now is on scaling AEP and building out a national structure. If it works, McCullough says that AEP and programs like it can help to “stitch our divided country back together.”
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