The purpose of the Rotary Youth Exchange program is to build bridges of friendship and understanding among the peoples of the world. We accomplish this by allowing high school students to live for a year in a foreign country, assimilating their host country's culture and language, and being ambassadors of goodwill while they are there. The students live with one or more appropriate host families, sharing in the life and love of each family, and attending high school or other pre-university schooling. As these student share of themselves and of their lives and experiences at home, the hosts develop bonds of friendship with these young ambassadors, and thereby with the people of the students' home countries. This building of international goodwill "one hug at a time" is what Rotary Youth Exchange is all about.

In the Fairmont MN Rotary Youth Exchange program, students are both sponsored and hosted by our Rotary Club. They are known as outbound and Inbound students. We promote the program at the Fairmont high school and, from applicants, do the initial student selection. We continue to maintain an active interest in our outbound students during an exchange and usually have each student give our club a report program after returning home. As a hosting Rotary Club we are responsible for the inbound students while they are on exchange. As hosts, we arrange to have suitable families to care for, house, and feed our students. We provide a Rotarian counselor for each student, and we pay a monthly Stepid to assist in thier normal and customary educational expenses. We also bring our students to some of the club meetings, which provides the opportunity for the students to become familiar with the club members and with what Rotary is and does. Management of the Rotary Youth Exchange program is done by our Rotary "District 5950" which has a geographical groupings of Rotary Clubs under a District Governor. After our Fairmont Rotary Club selects students it deems worthy of consideration, our district, through Youth Exchange Committees, is responsible for selecting the students who will actually go overseas and for placing incoming students with local Rotary Clubs.