A nonprofit organization is on a mission to end what it calls toxic polarization in the US through students. The American Exchange Project arranges for recent high school graduates to spend a free week in a different part of the country. The hope is to teach young Americans more about their neighbors in different states. George Stephanopoulos has more.

We all crave connection. We all need to know we belong.

Founded in 2019, the American Exchange Project says their mission is to connect a divided country country by sending high school seniors in the summer after they graduate on a free week-long trip to a town radically different from their own.

It's about all of the diversity that is in America: political, cultural, socioeconomic, racial, ethnic. We live in a massive and diverse country, and unless we can learn to socialize and connect with people who are different from us, our democratic project is really going to be in trouble. We're seeing that manifest itself every day.

In 2022, 20-year-old Cornell Horner traveled from his home outside Boston to Lemon, South Dakota, a town of roughly a thousand people.

We had many activities from going to a bison ranch and seeing how that process worked to going to town fairs, to even being a part of the town fair. Going to a meat processing facility was really cool. It was something I would never do out here.

Last summer, 19-year-old Bryce Borders went from his hometown of 13,000 in Kilcourt, Texas, to New York City.

I had this the perception that New York was this really busy, grungey, dirty place full of really busy and grumpy people. And when I got there, it was very different from that. We got to meet a lot of very nice people. And despite living very busy lives, fast-paced lives. The people that I experienced wanted to give their time to get to know us.

Since the program began, the American Exchange Project has run trips to 75 towns across 35 states.

It's your chance to truly test your own political ideas and actually talk to people and humanize those said people. It's very easy to put people in boxes and not truly understand their totality. And I think the American Exchange Project gives you a chance to do that. It's also a chance to just get practice of going outside of your bubble that you grew up in and experience a different reality.

We're all the same despite our differences. We're all people. We all live very interesting lives and that we can all learn from each other I think this is one of the biggest ways that you can solve the current split in the country is just by simply knowing each other better.