What is CISV?

Children's International Summer Villages is a unique independent, non-profit, non-political volunteer organization that offers children and adults the opportunity to make new friendships worldwide and understand and appreciate different cultures. Every summer, CISV brings together children and young people from all over the world to foster international understanding and friendships in the hope of achieving peaceful solutions to worldwide problems.

While CISV offers many different programs the philosophy of CISV can be summarized as a commitment to know countries through close friends rather than as abstract places on a map, and to accept others without prejudice or stereotypes.

The founder of CISV, Dr. Doris T. Allen perhaps best summarized the reasons for CISV in her twelve CISV principles:

1. To give children a face-to-face international experience before adolescence.
   
2. To give children the opportunity to grow up with a World point of view. This is why we set up a miniature world of 10 to 12 different countries in a single Village. It is not sufficient to relate to only one other country. This is an age in which all countries are inextricably interrelated. The demand of the times is to view the wholeness of the world.
   
3. To give children the opportunity to make friends around the world and to learn that it is possible to be friends irrespective of color, nationality, religion, language, or any other aspect of culture.
   
4. To give children the opportunity to get personally acquainted by limiting the Village to 40 to 48 children. And indeed the children say, "It was like a family."
   
5. To give children time to build deep friendships. Villages are four weeks long.
   
6. To keep the program simple, in order for the 11-year old to assimilate the experience: giving time to be quiet, for writing in a diary or writing letters home, time to exchange and compare stamps and coins of other countries, time to be alone, if desired, time to look at the photos of the families of other Villagers -- in short, ample free time to balance the scheduled hours.
   
7. To give children the opportunity to engage in the activities of other cultures: singing songs of other countries in other languages, learning dances of other countries, trying on costumes of other countries, and actually exchanging items of costume before the end of the Village.
   
8. To give children the opportunity to work jointly with other nationalities on committees -- for example: to set the dining room tables for meals, to sweep the dining room floor, to pick up paper, etc., from the yard, to plan an evening's entertainment, to plan an open-house bazaar, and so on.
   
9. To give children the opportunity to experience a oneness with nature wherever in the world: climbing a mountain, taking a bird walk, discovering the flowers and trees of the region, exploring life in a small stream, and so on.
   
10. To give children the opportunity to learn some skills of governance: Through the children's assemblies, the parliamentary sessions, learning how to elect a president and secretary, how to formulate any problems that may exist in the group, how to listen to different points of view and discuss alternative ways of solving problems, learning what is fair for the individual and at the same time for the group, and so on.
    
11. To give children an opportunity to become acquainted with the culture of the host country: spending a weekend in a home with a same-sex, same-age child, having open-house for the public to visit the Village and for the Villagers to meet people of the community, visiting a local zoo, farm, factory, or historical site. (Not more than one excursion a week).
    
12. To give children the opportunity to work with many nationalities and languages to say "Thank You" to the host community for the privilege of the Village: planting a tree on the site of the Village, building a foot bridge across a stream, painting parts of the main buildings of a Village, and so on.