Dear JYF and AYF Alumni,

Many of you have been wondering – and some have inquired – about the future of AYF. “Will there be an Academic Year in Freiburg 2020-21?” you ask. We sure hope so! And we are preparing for it. But, as has been the case so often these last few months, events are still rather dynamic. We – and our partner universities – are watching developments closely and hope to have clarity by mid-July.

As AYF staff shift their attention to preparations for next year, we are still busy with fallout from the program suspension.  “AYF Online” (with 9 instead of 2 in-house courses) is going alright, with all the hickups one would expect from such a drastic and sudden online pivot.  Advising continues apace and is still quite intense as we seek to process our suddenly upended lives together.  We are happy to share one student’s perspective on the transition home in this newsletter and will have more voices to share in the next few weeks through the alumni Facebook groups. 

We are also profoundly grateful for the Alumni Club Fundraiser which generated $11,000 in donations. That is a fabulous testament to your strength as an alumni community! With your help, the club was able to award $13,000 in emergency aid to 10 students. But more help will be needed. As of this writing, 19 students are still faced with up to 5 months of rent payments for their Freiburg dorm rooms since, sadly, finding tenants to sublet the rooms is excruciatingly slow and increasingly difficult. Therefore, the alumni club boards decided to share an update and renew their fundraising call.

Finally, we would like to close this newsletter with a contribution from our alumna Noelle Stadler. Noelle looks back at a very personal adventure she had during her time with AYF – tracking down and finding her long-lost German family and “Grandma Anna”. 

With best wishes, 

Peter McIsaac, Academic Director
Ulrich (Ulli) Struve, Program Director