Serve, Learn, and Explore: The GLA Way

GLA offers students opportunities to serve others, learn about other cultures and explore the world around them. Our high school summer programs combine a one-of-a-kind strategy for exploration, service and true learning that breaks cultural barriers.

The GLA way incorporates service and learning into a trip of a lifetime. Because students are getting out of a classroom and seeing things they’ve only read about, service trips like these really make learning come alive!

Serve

The service element gets participants involved in a local culture in a way that tourists can’t. Students interact with locals in countless ways, depending on their interests.

Those with a passion for sports can get involved in a Costa Rican volleyball team, for instance, becoming a role model and encouragement to the kids and teens there. Others could end up serving by teaching English to islanders in Bali. In every GLA program, service, exploration and education are woven together to create an unbeatable, life-changing journey.

Learn

Learning happens at many different levels on a high school service trip. High school volunteers can learn a language, learn about a nation’s history and learn how to get by in another culture. But perhaps even more meaningfully, GLA participants learn personal lessons that will last a lifetime–lessons in diversity, leadership and one’s relationship to the world around them.

Author Mary Anne Radmacher said, “I am not the same having seen the moon shine on the other side of the world.” The truth is, international travel and service does change you, teaching you lessons that go far deeper than facts about history or the correct pronunciation of “Hola.”

Explore

Though service and learning are huge factors in every GLA trip, exploration is just as important. Excursions to different locations within destination countries and adventure trips keep every week interesting and exciting–whether participants are white-water rafting in Peru, hitting the beaches in Costa Rica or exploring Mayan ruins in Guatemala.

Excursions and explorations in destination countries make the history and culture of a place come alive, adding depth to book-learning and meaning to the culture of the people that students are there to serve.