This summer, 50 teenagers from a Pacific island will land in Seattle. Your donation makes sure someone is ready for them.

Every year, FIUTS connects international students — and the people of the Puget Sound — to each other.

This Give Big season, we're asking Seattle to show up for the work no university or government agency is doing. Give during Give Big and help us fund a full summer of connection, welcome, and real-world opportunity for students and families across our region.

Give Big Is Our Season. Here's Why This Year Matters.

Spring and early summer are the most active season on FIUTS' calendar. Students are stepping into leadership. New volunteers are joining. Families are signing up to host. And a summer full of programs — including two major visiting student camps — is coming.

The donations FIUTS raises during Give Big fund what's already in motion: a week-long homestay for Kiribati students meeting their first Seattle family, a Japanese exchange group playing catch at a Mariners game, a student from Seoul standing in front of a classroom of third-graders in Rainier Valley. These are not abstract programs. They are scheduled dates on a calendar, and they need your support right now.

50 Teenagers. One Month.
8,000 Miles From Home.

This summer, FIUTS is welcoming approximately 50 high school students from the Pacific island nation of Kiribati for a four-week English language and leadership camp on the University of Washington campus.

Most of these students have never left their home islands. They are here to strengthen the skills they need to compete for college and careers — English fluency, digital literacy, professional communication. They are bright, driven, and headed back to a country that needs everything they are learning.

Here is what their month in Seattle looks like: They spend their days in intensive English language classes. They explore the city with local youth ambassadors — Seattle high school students who become their first American friends. They spend a weekend with a Seattle host family, sitting around a kitchen table, trading stories about their lives. And on their last night, they perform the traditional dances and songs of Kiribati for the people who welcomed them.

None of this happens without funding. The Kiribati program is a rare thing: a direct investment in the future of a small island nation, and an opportunity for people in our area to learn about life on an island in the Pacific. Students expand their worldview and make a friend who lives in the middle of the ocean. Local hosts share meals and stories with wide-eyed Kiribati students around the table. 

Your Give Big donation helps make that month possible.

A Baseball Game. A Food Bank. A Friendship That Crosses an Ocean.

Each summer, FIUTS hosts students from Japanese universities for short-term exchange programs that do something deliberate: put international students and Seattle locals in the same room, doing the same thing, side by side.

Students from Kanda University have explored Pike Place Market on foot, eaten their way through the stalls, attended a Mariners game, visited the Gates Foundation Discovery Center, and spent an afternoon packing meals at Food Lifeline alongside local volunteers. They have also met visiting students from other countries — including Iraq — sitting around a table comparing notes on what Seattle is like when you're new to it.

These programs are not tourism. They are the kind of shared experience that breaks down the assumption that the world outside your country is abstract. After a day at the ballpark with a Japanese student who has never seen baseball before, the world gets a little smaller — in the best way.

Support FIUTS this Give Big and fund the programs that bring students from across the Pacific into Seattle's daily life.

Leadership You Can't Learn in a Lecture Hall

Every spring, as the weather turns and campus comes back to life, FIUTS sees the same thing: international students who came to Seattle knowing almost no one are now organizing events, leading orientation groups, and recruiting the next wave of volunteers.

This season, students are applying to serve as FIUTS Facilitators, leading small-group experiences for their fellow students like language salons and Mt. Rainier hikes. Others are joining the Student Board and taking on real responsibility for how FIUTS operates.

This is the kind of leadership that stays with someone. A student from South Korea who runs an event in April is a different person by May: more confident, more capable, more connected to this city and the people in it. And the Seattle community — the volunteers, the families, the neighbors who show up — gets a richer, more alive event because a student from Seoul decided to go all-in.

Spring programming thrives on spring donations. Give Big and invest in what happens when international students lead.

Open a Door. Change Two Lives.

One of the most important things FIUTS does every year costs very little money and changes two lives in ways no one fully predicts in advance.

A student arrives from India with an apartment lined up and three classes scheduled. What she does not have is a person. Then a FIUTS host family opens their home for a weekend — or a week — and suddenly she does. She has someone who shows her where the good grocery stores are. Whose kids ask her questions about her hometown. Who invites her back for Thanksgiving.

Years later, host families tell us the same thing: their kids learned more about the world from their FIUTS student than from any class they took. The student often says the same thing about Seattle.

Your donation this Give Big supports the outreach, coordination, and staff time that goes into recruiting, training, and matching host families across the region — in Ballard, Wedgwood, Shoreline, Kent, and beyond. Without that investment, fewer families find their way to FIUTS. Fewer students get the kitchen table. The city stays a little more separated than it needs to be.

Give Big. Help us open more doors.

Here Is Exactly What Happens When You Give

This is not a wish list. These are programs already scheduled — and your donation is what pays for them.

$35 — Covers a student's welcome materials, cultural orientation packet, and first program activity when they arrive in Seattle.

$75 — Sponsors one Kiribati student for their homestay weekend with a Seattle family — the visit participants say was the highlight of their entire month.

$150 — Funds one month of FIUTS Pen Pals for a Title I classroom in Seattle, pairing third-graders with international university students for a quarter of letters and one in-person meeting.

$500 — Brings an international student ambassador into a K–6 classroom in White Center, Rainier Valley, or Beacon Hill for a full-quarter Global Ambassador Day visit.

$1,000+ — Sustains FIUTS's host family recruitment and matching operations for a month — the infrastructure behind every homestay, every welcome weekend, every relationship that starts with a stranger at a door.

This Work Happens in Seattle Homes or It Doesn't Happen.

Universities handle the transcripts. The federal government — for now — is stepping back from people-to-people diplomacy. What remains is this: a 77-year-old organization, older than the Space Needle, that has always known how to turn arriving students into known neighbors.

The people paying for this work now are the people who already live here. That is not a crisis. It is a clarification of what FIUTS has always been: Seattle's work, funded by Seattle.

Give Big is our moment. Help us make this summer count.