My 19 yr son is just graduating from the Vancouver Film School. Essentially it was a 12 month concentrated course on film making. He’s wisely decided that he’s not ready to take Hollywood by storm just yet and now wants to start university in September.
In the meantime, instead of getting a McDonald’s type student job, he’s wondering about youth programs where he could go to a foreign country to either work or volunteer(with accomodations covered). I’m sure there are organizations out there, but I’m just not aware of them.
He has a relatively short window of opportunity to do something like this since he’ll be back in school in September, so can’t sign up for a long term project, but could go for four or five months.
American Field Service (www.afs.org) does community service projects abroad for 4-6 months. Great program. i did their high school exchange program for 6 months and it was amazing. I highly recommend them.
I used to work at a co-op residence / summer hotel that was part of Ryerson back in mid 80s to early 90’s for summer jobs. We always had British students coming to work with us on an exchange program. They lived at the residence and worked at the hotel. I can’t remember the name of the program though… I’ll do some digging and see if I can find it for you.
A number of Universities do this across Canada and Europe (turn the residences into low cost hotels) so you might want to look into that for your son.
HKIS (Hong Kong International School) is fantastic and provides lodging to boot. Fantastic school/organization, definitely a place he could work… bonus, Hong Kong has a pretty rad film scene too.
My daughters’ school is involved with Free the Children and I know they do several projects overseas to help poor children. It’s an incredible organization and I highly recommend it. Info on volunteering is here:
IKnowEverything - You just brought back a flood of memories. HKIS is where I did my first few years of elementary school back in the late 70’s/early 80’s. Sadly haven’t had a chance to get back since.
lilpups - Nice!! It’s amazing where you run into HKIS “alum” (we all know almost no one actually GRADUATES from there, haha). You would not BELIEVE how it’s changed. The original elementary school is still there, but they also built a high school and separate middle school out near the Tai Tam reservoir. I did three years of middle school there (RIGHT after they opened the new middle school). Left about two weeks before the changeover in '97, crazy (but very cool time) to be in Hong Kong!
If you get a chance, you should go back, it’s amazingly cool.