We were lucky to catch up with Stephen Rutherford recently and have shared our conversation below.

Stephen, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today One of our favorite things to hear about is stories around the nicest thing someone has done for someone else – what’s the nicest thing someone has ever done for you?

When I was seventeen, I joined a Youth For Understanding family in Japan as a high school exchange student. YFU families are 100% volunteers who cover meals and the incidental increase in utilities that come from having an extra person in the home. They open their family to a young person from another country and treat them like their own child. It’s a relationship that lasts forever. I loved my Japanese parents and my three Japanese brothers, but I did not understand everything they did for me until I became a YFU parent. Forty years later I still think of them as my second family. They gave me a transformational experience that allowed me to grow in ways I never imagined.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

Youth For Understanding is a nonprofit that was established in 1951 in order to foster world peace through citizen exchanges. I was in the YFU Class of 1985 and I first became a YFU parent in 2005. Today my wife and I have 28 children – four natural children and 24 YFU sons from 18 countries. We love helping people who want to join us as YFU parents. Hosting is the most important action a family can take to further the cause of world peace.

In the past ten years, YFU awarded $423,000 to St. Louis students so that they could join YFU families abroad while in high school. During that same period, YFU awarded $246,000 to international students to join YFU families in St. Louis. At this moment, twenty high school students from other countries are currently in St. Louis on full merit or need-based scholarships through YFU. In June 2025, YFU will take a group of fifteen students from three St. Louis vocational schools to Germany on full scholarships.

These opportunities offer our youth one of the most transformational experiences they will ever experience. YFU families with children often remark that hosting was the best way to teach their children to have empathy for those who are different. It is the best way to give them a sense of humanity towards others.

Dwight Eisenhower was one of the founding members of citizen exchanges. He believed that the exchange of students, teachers and others was the truest path to peace because it answered three important questions:

How do we dispel ignorance?
How do we learn of others and have them learn of us?
How do we build friendships across nations?

I am so grateful to YFU for giving me the opportunity to help others in my community. Youth For Understanding is the #1 organization in St. Louis in terms of giving merit and need-based scholarships that enable students to study abroad while in high school.

How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?

I try to work with integrity everyday. That does not mean telling everything to everybody all the time. We work with a lot of confidential information and it is appropriate at times to tell people that information cannot be shared rather than making up an excuse. It also means that sometimes you need to have a hard conversation rather than saying something that sounds good but is not the truth.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

I had to come to terms with the fact that not everyone sees the world as I do. It is very difficult to understand the importance of exchange programs if you were never an exchange student in high school. Many people feel helpless when they think about world peace, but imagine if every family had a son or daughter from another country? It is a constant challenge to convey the importance of the program and the value in helping others without expecting a financial reward.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.yfuusa.org
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