We design creative, interactive, curriculum-driven educational programs for students and career professionals in the US and six foreign countries.

Our programs are of 10-17 days’ duration, and focus largely on community service and professional development. Programs run throughout the year in the Americas and South Africa.

Our programs for high school students feature a suite of meaningful service learning activities, performed with and alongside peers from the region.

Programs are designed to meet a genuine community need, while encouraging cross-cultural socialization and an understanding of contemporary issues in the host country.

Nine of our eleven programs offer an intensive foreign-language development opportunity.

Recent service has included:

These activities are described in each of our nine standard student service learning programs, which may be modified consistent with your school’s unique needs.

Beginning in 2005, we will add new service modules, such as:

Near Johannesburg, South Africa, for instance, we are formalizing a 3-way service collaboration with Kingsmead College and the Masechaba Saturday School of Excellence.

To view selected service modules, please visit the Kingsmead College website. Click “Community Service”.

We also offer curriculum-driven student programs that do not include the community service element.

These programs, offered at the secondary and university level, are designed as capstones to supplement, enhance, and inform coursework pursued on campus during the academic year.

Please visit the Northfield Mount Hermon School’s website to view how we contribute to that institution’s humanities curriculum. See the course entitled “Humanities II: South Africa Sojourn.

Our career programs are designed to offer a solid continuing-education experience for early-, mid-, and late-career professionals from myriad disciplines.

Delegates exchange ideas, present research results, and discuss best practices with local colleagues from their own field of endeavor.

Each career program features, as its cornerstone, a series of interactive workshops addressing substantive topics of keen interest to all stakeholders – US visitors and local professionals alike.

Clients may request dialogues with policy experts and opinion leaders from throughout the broad spectrum of civil society – and from their own area of specialized interest.

For examples of our recent and continuing work on behalf of professional associations, kindly refer to:

We encourage our clients – secondary schools, university departments, professional associations, and other institutions – to maintain enduring relationships with the students and colleagues whom they encounter.

Clients may build an electronic community for correspondence, social connection, and ongoing exchange of ideas, or even host their local partners, as the American School in London did in February 2004.

Above all, we believe, clients maximize the value of their initial encounter by committing to a series of subsequent visits that involve both new and returning participants.

Several clients have decided to support Alterra’s non-profit work, designed in partnership with local institutions to strengthen educational opportunity for disadvantaged local students.

Please see Our Support of Local-Community Initiatives for more information.