World Learning, Inc.
Programs and results
What we aim to solve
Our programs
What are the organization's current programs, how do they measure success, and who do the programs serve?
SIT Study Abroad
A pioneer in experiential, field-based study abroad, SIT offers semester and summer programs for undergraduate students in Africa, Asia and the Pacific, Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East, as well as comparative programs in multiple locations and global virtual internships.
SIT prepares students to be interculturally effective leaders, professionals, and citizens. In so doing, SIT fosters a worldwide network of individuals and organizations committed to responsible global citizenship. SIT fulfills this mission with field-based academic study abroad programs for undergraduates and accredited master’s degrees and certificate programs for graduates and professionals.
Experiment in International Living
The Experiment in International Living offers immersive summer exchange programs both abroad and virtually for high school students who want to meaningfully engage with the richness and complexities of another country. Today, The Experiment offers programs in more than 20 countries in Europe, the Americas, Africa, and Asia and the Pacific, as well as global virtual programs.
Programs are designed around specific themes to equip students with essential intercultural skills and a deeper awareness of the global issues shaping the diverse communities they visit or interact with.
SIT Graduate Institute
SIT Graduate Institute offers internationally focused, full-time and low-residency master’s degrees, as well as certificate and professional development programs. Areas of study include international education, sustainable development, peacebuilding and conflict transformation, Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL), and a self-designed option. Programs are based on the experiential learning model, a commitment to social justice, and intercultural communication.
Founded in 1964 as the School for International Training, SIT served as a training center for early Peace Corps volunteers. Today, SIT Graduate Institute prepares students from around the world to become informed and effective leaders, professionals, and global citizens.
Global Development Programs
Our Global Development Programs prepare communities worldwide to effectively address critical issues such as poverty and exclusion, youth participation, educational access and quality, the spread of HIV/AIDS, the marginalization of women and children, and government accountability. We work with local partners to identify specific needs, resources, and challenges. This valuable local context informs the design and implementation of custom development activities, and ensures that our partners invest deeply in projects and provide the local leadership required to secure long-term success.
Where we work
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Goals & Strategy
Learn about the organization's key goals, strategies, capabilities, and progress.
Charting impact
Four powerful questions that require reflection about what really matters - results.
What is the organization aiming to accomplish?
Today’s increasingly complex, globalizing world demands extraordinary leadership. We need new leaders with fresh ideas, strong values, tech savvy, and the ability to communicate effectively and empathetically across cultures. World Learning’s mission is to empower this generation of rising global citizens to build peace, prosperity, inclusion, and responsive institutions through education, exchange, and development programs.
World Learning works with a range of students and professionals, from American high school and undergraduate students; to leaders of grassroots NGO in Africa, the Caribbean, and the Middle East/North Africa region; to teachers and school administrators working in countries such as Egypt, Lebanon, and Pakistan; to mid-career peacebuilding professionals working the world’s most critical conflict zones. We place a special emphasis on inclusion, offering programs tailored for women and girls, persons with disabilities, the LGBT community, and youth from low-income backgrounds.
The individuals and institutions with which World Learning works often have significant potential to become positive contributors to their communities and the world, but lack crucial skills, networks, or funds. A student with vast potential may lack inter-cultural awareness necessary for exploring a new career, or a school principal in a developing country may lack the English language skills to implement a new STEM curriculum. We believe that, by instilling skills and global competence through experiential education, undergraduate and graduate courses, and capacity building programs, we can help the world’s emerging leaders fulfill their potential and become the change makers that our world needs.
World Learning realizes its outcome goals through the actions of program alumni. We are succeeding if our undergraduate and graduate program alumni focus their careers on creating positive social change, and if our international development program beneficiaries become more effective, mission-driven civil society institutions. By creating these outcomes, we will achieve our long term goal to create a just world, driven by engaged citizens and thriving communities.
What are the organization's key strategies for making this happen?
World Learning believes that a just world requires engaged citizens. Our strategy for creating engaged citizens is to offer programs that help participants build the knowledge and skills to lead positive change in their home communities and around the world.
World Learning’s ambitious, global mission requires a wide array program strategies. We work with a geographically, demographically, and socio-economically diverse group of tens of thousands of students, emerging young leaders, and civil society and political professionals each year. Program areas include:
Education: World Learning offers accredited academic programs for students from high school through graduate-levels. These education programs create a pipeline of globally competent, engaged, and social justice oriented professionals who become high impact political, civil society, and business leaders.
World Learning’s first program, the 82-year-old Experiment in International Living, offers three- to five-week summer programs that immerse high school students in other cultures and languages.
World Learning’s SIT Study Abroad programs offer American undergraduate students the chance to have immersive, life-transforming experiences in more than 50 countries; these programs share a focus on academically rich field research, non-traditional locations, and family homestay experiences.
The accredited SIT Graduate Institute, with campuses in both Vermont and Washington, DC, offers internationally focused full-time and low-residency master's degrees, as well as certificate and professional development programs.
Exchange: World Learning brings emerging leaders from 140 countries annually to the United States for international exchanges. We offer short-term learning experiences for individuals seeking professional development through links to US and international colleagues, new insights, and a broader view of American culture, and well as academic exchanges that place international students in US colleges and universities to strengthen their leadership and career-specific skills while they explore US culture.
Development: World Learning’s international development programs help global civil society leaders take action in their home communities. Our programs prepare communities worldwide to effectively address critical issues such as poverty and exclusion, youth participation, educational access and quality, the marginalization of women and children, and government accountability. We work with our local leaders to identify specific needs, resources, and challenges—gaining valuable local context that informs the design and implementation of custom development activities. This capacity-building approach ensures that our partners invest deeply in projects and provide the local leadership required to ensure their long-term success.
What are the organization's capabilities for doing this?
Over our 80+ years of operation, World Learning has developed exceptional capacity in leadership development and experiential education, an international footprint that includes almost every country in the world, and a network of global partners that allows us to quickly and effectively scale our best programs.
Leadership Development and Experiential Education Capacity: World Learning has been perfecting short-term, semester-long, and full for-credit Masters programs in intercultural leadership, sustainable development, civil society management, and more for over 80 years. The World Learning pedagogical formula—combining evidence-based best practices, experiential learning, and opportunities for personal growth—has been endorsed by tens of thousands and program participants and millions of dollars in US government contracts for exchange and leadership development programs.
Global Reach: Our global staff networks includes trainers and program officers in over 60 countries. Many of our global offices are 95% to 100% comprised of local citizens, giving us a unique advantage in offering programs that are culturally sensitive and community-led. This global reach allows us to reach community leaders and students who would otherwise never be exposed to cross-cultural opportunities, especially those living in conflict-afflicted in impoverished countries—where World Learning program can have uniquely strong impact.
Partner Network: World Learning partners with international NGOs, small local nonprofits, government agencies, and businesses across the world. Our partners collaborate on program implementation, help seek or provide necessary funding for program participants, and identify, recruit, and help work with our program participants. Major program partners include Mobility International USA (MIUSA), with which World Learning collaborates to improve accessibility across World Learning’s program portfolio, Cisco, with which World Learning is collaborating to promote local entrepreneurs, workforce development, and economic growth in developing countries, and AMIDEAST, with which World Learning is partnering to improve the quality of English language teaching in schools in the Middle East and North Africa, a region where the need for qualified English teachers is now more critical than ever.
What have they accomplished so far and what's next?
More than 100,000 young people have experienced a World Learning program. Our alumni include Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Jody Williams, and the late Peace Corps Founder Sargent Shriver. Sargent Shriver’s experience on The Experiment in International Living informed the founding principles of the Peace Corps, and he called on then-Experiment President Gordon Boyce to help train the first Peace Corps volunteers to Gabon and Pakistan.
Our international development team has been consistently endorsed by the United States Agency for International Development with contracts for 55 major projects in 30 countries. Our Pakistan Reading Project alone is training 94,000 teachers in 38,000 public schools across Pakistan, and ultimately impacting 2.5 million primary school students.
World Learning recognizes that meaningful progress can only come from a “whole of society” approach that meets the needs and draws on contributions of the populations with which we are engaged. That is why World Learning builds the capacity of young leaders and provides capacity building assistance that helps nonprofit organizations worldwide thrive. Our best role is to empower, and not to replace, local young leaders as change makers. Because our programs are long-term, and because the successes of our alumni are often measured over distinguished careers rather than a few months, we occasionally have difficulty convincing potential donors to join us in making early, ambitious investments in the world’s next generation.
We pride ourselves on the diversity of our program participants. In every one of our programs, we strive to make opportunities available to those who would otherwise lack the resources to travel or study abroad: from Burmese ethnic minorities to inner-city American public school students. To achieve these goals, we have collaborated with leading youth serving non-profits, public and charter schools, Historically Black Colleges and Universities, and other partners worldwide.
These socio-economically and geographically diverse students regularly require additional resources to travel and to act on their ideas. Additional support would allow those lacking financial resources to participate in our programs, and will ensure that our next generation of global leaders fully represents the world’s diversity.
Financials
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Operations
The people, governance practices, and partners that make the organization tick.
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Connect with nonprofit leaders
SubscribeBuild relationships with key people who manage and lead nonprofit organizations with GuideStar Pro. Try a low commitment monthly plan today.
- Analyze a variety of pre-calculated financial metrics
- Access beautifully interactive analysis and comparison tools
- Compare nonprofit financials to similar organizations
Want to see how you can enhance your nonprofit research and unlock more insights? Learn More about GuideStar Pro.
World Learning, Inc.
Board of directorsas of 09/10/2021
Mr. Larry Cooley
Thomas Hiatt
Centerfield Capital Partners
Charles MacCormack
Dana Smith Kull
Judith Brown Meyers
Judith Brown Company
Robert W Adams
Richard Adler
European Investors
J. Brian Atwood
University of Minnesota
Robert Chase
Lawrence S Cooley
Management Systems International (MSI)
Allen B Cutler
Jane Edwards
Yale University
Thomas H Fox
Leonade Jones
Sharon Lim
Virginia Loeb
Paul Muther
Emilie M Ogden
North Ridge Foundation
Brian Stephens
KPMG
Phyllis Watt Ingersoll
Stephen Lowey
Lowey Dannenberg Cohen & Hart, P.C.
David A Murdoch
K & L Gates, LLP
Susan Plimpton
Organizational demographics
Who works and leads organizations that serve our diverse communities? Candid partnered with CHANGE Philanthropy on this demographic section.
Leadership
The organization's leader identifies as:
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