Maine family receives award for building local AFS community

Longtime host parents Nancy and Charlie Grant received NEWS CENTER Maine’s 2019 “2 Those Who Care” award for their decades-long effort to fostered life-changing intercultural experiences in their community. The Grants, who recently retired from hosting AFS Exchange Students, established an AFS presence based in Orono, Maine, in the 1970s. They were instrumental in bridging cultures and have left a deep, lasting impact on the lives of countless Maine families and the international students hosted by them. Read more at NEWS CENTER Maine.

Influential Australian television executive memorialized

The late Marena Manzoufas’s contribution to television was immense, in both her native Australia and beyond. After a formative year in Texas after winning an AFS scholarship, she developed into a lifelong advocate for multiculturalism. Manzoufas served as the assistant national representative of AFS Australia and, later, was critical for the development of Australia’s multicultural policy in the 1970s. She helped launch the nation’s first television subtitling unit. Under her guidance, the children’s show Bananas in Pyjamas became international hit. Read more at the Sydney Morning Herald.

Exchange Student Bailea from New Zealand settles into Connecticut life

West Hartford’s ongoing series profiling AFS Exchange Students and their host families continues, with this interview of Bailea, an AFSer from Auckland, New Zealand. As the daughter of an AFS Returnee, she had always been interested in becoming an exchange student. Now on the program, she highly recommends it to others, saying, “If you’re the slightest bit interested in learning about a new culture, definitely do it.” Read more at We-Ha.