A project to bring together young Americans of different backgrounds hopes to become first nationwide domestic exchange program in the US. Eighteen-year-old Clarissa Ko lives in the Boston suburb of Wellesley, where the average house costs close to $1.5m (£1.1m). The high school senior works part-time at a restaurant called Pappa Razzi and spends much of her time researching universities.

Ben Martin is also 18 and lives outside Lake Charles, Louisiana, a town known for oil refineries and a major casino where the per capita income is less than $30,000 (£21,800), and where two major hurricanes last year took dozens of lives and destroyed whole communities.

 

Despite the contrasting worlds around them the two have become close friends over the past year, chatting in online hangouts sometimes until two o'clock in the morning.  This is all thanks to the American Exchange Project (AEP), a new initiative that's working to connect young Americans from across the country's constellation of different - and differing - socio-economic backgrounds and regions. Here is highlighting to you few facts about this project. 

It's the brainchild of David McCullough, who four-and-a-half years ago spent the summer driving from Boston to Cleveland to Texas and to the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, studying the impact of poverty on education. It is this journey uncovered for him something else entirely: listening to America's teenagers he learned how they were growing up in their own bubbles, but that they are keenly aware of that and crucially, were keen to experience something else. David states that "It was evident to me travelling around the country that a lot of kids are growing up around kids that are exactly like them, going off to extraordinarily similar futures," he says. "And kids, almost on an instinctive level, sense that." It is this experience that moved him a little over a year ago and served as inspiration for him to establish the American Exchange Project with the goal of offering high school students the opportunity to interact with their peers. 

Online meet ups an integral part of the American Exchange Project (AEP):  

 

Over 175 students at 39 schools in 14 states have so far taken part in AEP's online "hangouts". The meetings take place three or four times a week and involve discussions on topics ranging from the everyday such as comparing the songs on each other's Spotify lists to serious issues such as racism. Says McCullough about the project "If you're growing up in a big city, you're going to a small town; affluent kids are going to disadvantaged areas," He further adds that The idea's to get you into a place that's as close to the opposite of where you're growing up as you can find." 

 

While studying abroad has been a beloved and popular experience among students for decades, McCullough hopes his efforts will motivate young Americans to see their own country from others' point of view - and maybe curb the animosity currently dividing the country. He says that the ultimate goal of this project is for every school in America to be involved.  

At a time when socio-political divisions in the United States are at fever pitch, perhaps worst illustrated by the 6 January siege of the Capitol in Washington DC by supporters of former president Donald Trump, McCullough believes efforts to unite even a small cohort of the population has never been more vital, and which is exactly the reason ‘Why’ he has initiated this novel domestic American Exchange Program.