My Nonprofit Reviews

My family's experience with YFU as a host to an exchange student is summarized below as a warning to others to avoid this organization; whose actions are far from professed values and whose ethics lack integrity.

Attempts at a responsible reconciliation through YFU president and board chair were stone walled. The racist comments by their local staff, recorded on tape, was never addressed, and the staff remained stealthily in charge of the student.

Our experience was that YFU was eager to place students but their Midwest region also had a predetermined opinion of an "American family" which in the Midwest, excluded families like my biracial family where a black naturalized woman is married to a white man. YFU's local district intereacted with us as if we were under an investigation and that they were social workers. They repeatedly attempted to poison the exchange student against our family to find non-existent issues. Thank goodness we had a great student. It was clear from every false allegation directed only at my wife, that Midwest YFU lacked the cultural wherewithal they needed to coordinate the simplest of all exchange programs. If the national office addressed this correctly, all would have been well, but YFU's leadership failed to lead ethically in this matter. Shame.