About Us

Global Citizen Adventure Corps (GCAC) provides college credit and scholarships for service-learning and travel opportunities to high school and university students in rural communities, bringing their voices and personal experiences to global issues. GCAC participants become leaders, who also bring a global perspective back to their home communities, resulting in exponential change for all people, places, and planet.

Everyone has a role to play in creating a better world; GCAC programs are open to all students and community members worldwide.

However, we primarily serve rural students from economically challenged communities in the Mid-South and Ohio Valley regions.
In recent decades, as the “nightly news” became a 24-hour stream and social media allowed for unedited and, unfortunately, often uninformed voices to shout louder than calming influences, divisions of thought and practice have become more evident across the U.S, and GCAC founders and board members easily recognized its impact on the rural South. Relying primarily on what is seen and heard within smaller city limits and limited worldviews, systemic issues such as poverty, addiction, and racism continue to grow, and traditional responses to counteract the negativity do not appear to be working.

Rural youth collectively comprise twenty percent of public school students in the United States. Many are enrolled in Title I high schools and if they attend college, are often the first generation to do so. Rural school districts are small with constrained resources often based on population, and, therefore, underserved as compared to their urban counterparts. Furthermore, in recent decades, urban and suburban communities have experienced an increase in ethnically diverse populations which is not true in rural settings further limiting exposure to significant cultural influences.

These complex challenges beg the question: how might a young person develop cultural competency without access to do so? Global Citizen Adventure Corps strives to fill that void.