A Million Ladders, with Ellen Hoggard – Episode 474 of The Action Catalyst Podcast

Ellen Hoggard, President of High School in the USA cultural exchange program, a part of GEC, Global Educational Concepts, shares memories of being detained at the Berlin wall, hotels with bullet holes in the walls, and being followed by the KGB, and talks about staying true to yourself at forks in the road, getting 100s of kids home during Covid, some tips on what to pack from a VERY well-traveled person, and ALL that we have to gain from worldwide cultural exchange.

About Ellen:

Ellen Hoggard, President of High School in the USA cultural exchange program, a part of GEC, Global Educational Concepts, has been working in the field of international educational exchange for over 35 years. She was a high school exchange student herself at 14 to England and at 16 to Romania. Those 2 experiences were life changing and led her to major in International Relations at Duke University. Since that time, Ms. Hoggard has been a passionate supporter of exchanges, especially high school exchange programs.

She has received the Award for Distinguished Service from Sister Cities International, the Exemplary Leadership Award from the Alliance for International Exchange where she served as Treasurer for 3 consecutive terms and held 4 consecutive board positions.

She is proud to have been a pioneer in the creation of the first long term high school exchanges between the USA and the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in the 1990s. She was also honored to be chosen to represent the entire field of youth exchange of the United States of America at the Department of State sponsored European Union – USA Summit in 1996.

Ms. Hoggard has worked for numerous organizations in the field of international educational exchange including AFS, AMIDEAST, Sister Cities International, OPEN DOOR Student Exchange, AYUSA, STS Foundation/STS Global Studies, Au Pair Foundation and HSUSA. She has served as President/Managing Director in the 4 most recent positions. She is also an experienced grant writer/fund raiser having raised over 1 million dollars of funding for her exchange programs.

Learn more at HighSchoolintheUSA.com.

The Action Catalyst is presented by the Southwestern Family of Companies. With each episode, the podcast features some of the nation’s top thought leaders and experts, sharing meaningful tips and advice. Learn more at TheActionCatalyst.com, subscribe below or wherever you listen to podcasts, and be sure to leave a rating and review!

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(Transcribed using A.I. / May include errors):

Adam Outland
Today’s guest is Ellen Hoggard, President of High School in the USA cultural exchange program, a part of GEC, Global Educational Concepts right here at the Southwestern Family of Companies. Ellen, thank you so much for being with us today. How does someone find their way into the field that you’re in with cultural and international exchange programs?

Ellen Hoggard
Well, thank you for asking me, and thank you for having me. And you know, honestly, the best way to learn about international educational exchange personally is to either host an exchange student in your own family or to go on an exchange yourself. And I actually, personally have done both things. I went to England at the age the little age of 14 years old, and came running home from high school as a high school freshman with all these papers, and said, Mom, Dad, I want to go on this exchange program. And they looked at each other and said, what’s an exchange program? I had to convince them that this is a great idea to go to England for a summer and live with the host family. And my parents knew I was always interested in everything International, because I heard all the stories about my ancestors from Scotland and Ireland. So of course, I wanted to go explore, so I went to England for a summer, and then we hosted my English sister for a few weeks, I think a month. She came back the next summer, and my host mom from England, she came and stayed with so actually, I’ve been in touch with my host mom until last year, when she sadly passed away. But these are lifelong relationships that you create and have forever with these people. And then, because I got bitten by that bug, I went to Romania of all places, on a music exchange with my high school at 16 years old. That was the most formative experience of my young life, because no one at that point in the 70s was going to Romania. It was a very communist country. Behind the Iron Curtain. Everywhere I went, I was always the first American anyone ever saw. And it was not lost on me that the presumption was that Americans were evil and we were bad people, because that’s what their media had told them, because they literally only had the Communist Party feeding them whatever they wanted to say. This was an incredible moment for me in Romania to be talking in my very poor French to Romanians, that’s their second language, and trying to have a Romanian teenagers talk to the American teenagers with me on my program. And I want to be honest with you at that moment, I remember standing in Romania thinking, I don’t know what my life’s gonna look like when I’m a grown up, but I have to do something like this, because I could see at that young age that there were so many misconceptions and misunderstandings about our countries, but we were all just young teenage kids. We liked the same things, we listened to the music, we found commonalities, and I was hooked.

Adam Outland
Yeah. I grew up in Germany for about seven, eight years, and it was during, well, the very, very beginning of my life, there was still a wall up, wow. You know, my dad and mom were opera singers, and they would perform in East Berlin, so they had to, like, transit, you know, across that line and then get to be worried about crossing back over. And the conversations that you’d have, you know, just talking to my dad about it was with people in East Berlin, and they all love the arts. It’s kind of what brought them together. But cultural sharing and that wall that was put up really prevented that for many years. It created a metaphorical wall between the cultures and east and west. And I think about that when we talk about international exchange, because when I moved to the States to western North Carolina, there were not a lot of traveled people in that community, and there was some layers of lack of understanding and context, and a lot of honestly negative things come from that. But I think how important it was to my childhood to have an international perspective on life.

Ellen Hoggard
So you understand our experience in our world, probably better than anybody having lived there in very formative years in your life. I spent a lot of time in Germany running what was called the Congress Bundestag exchange program. That’s it’s actually one of the oldest exchange programs supported by the German Bundestag and the US Congress. And we send hundreds of Americans for a year, and they send hundreds of Germans for a year to live in each other’s homes and go to high school. And I was deeply honored to run the vocab. Educational part of that for nine years. So I went back and forth to Germany twice or three times a year. And I won’t go into the whole story, but let’s just say I went to East Berlin every year, and one year I broke all my own rules from my students. I didn’t tell anyone I was going. I went by myself. I stayed too late, and I actually was detained at the Berlin Wall for probably, um, they took my passport away, and I was detained for several hours, and it was a very interesting experience for me to really understand and appreciate what democracy and freedom really means, because in those hours where no one knew where I was because I was foolish and young, I realized what blessings we have to be able to come back, but the East Germans that eventually, that I don’t know what it was in my paperwork, that red flag me. But eventually, because I stayed calm, I spoke very politely, they eventually let me go back, and the East Germans in the line with me to help me through, helped me get on the right train, because I was so unnerved I was going to get on the wrong train and go further into East Germany. But again, people are wonderful. People are people all trying to help each other.

Adam Outland
What’s so interesting about the work that you do, because on an individual perspective, it’s very eye opening and formative and and you build these cross cultural relationships. I think in a macro perspective, it can shift a country’s dynamics.

Ellen Hoggard
100%. So at one point in my career, I was deeply honored to be the person who was sent all through the Soviet then Soviet Union to convince ministries of education to sign the first agreements ever allowing High School long term exchanges between Soviet and communist countries in our country, and one of my favorite was liszthuania. I took a 12 hour train ride that turned out being a 15 hour train ride from St Petersburg to Vilnius, and there was no heat on the train, no food on the train, but I shared this compartment with this lovely couple. He was a veteran from World War Two. They shared their food with me, and I bought blankets for all of us. And I just remember thinking, I just need to get to Vilnius and get a cup of coffee in a hot shower, because I had the first group of liszthuanian teenagers to ever come to the US long term waiting for their orientation program from me. And I stepped off the train, and the gentleman I worked with in Lithuania said, Welcome to Lithuania, we’re thrilled you convinced the ministry to let this happen. And by the way, there’s no hot water, there’s no shower for you, but we’ll get you a cup of coffee. So I said, Okay, wow. Okay, beautiful, gorgeous country. I can’t say enough about this part of the world. I cannot say enough about that part of the world that is not as well traveled by Americans as other parts of Europe, I highly recommend everyone to go and Romania. I have to put a pitch in for my host country, where I’m not going to lie. It was very emotional when I went there and signed the first agreement with the remaining government for the first long term exchange students. I got there just after the revolution, and the hotel I stayed in still had bullet holes in the walls. My family wasn’t too happy about me going, but nothing was going to stop me, and we did sign the first agreement when I went at 16. Let me be clear, it was a short term, three week music exchange supported by the Reader’s Digest. Fast forward to the early 90s. These exchanges were long term students coming for five months or 10 months, serious exchange. And by the way, not accompanied by a KGB agent, which my group was the whole time we were in Romania. They came on their own. They stayed with families. It was a true, pure, real exchange experience for these kids.

Adam Outland
It also plays a massive role in creating cultural relationships for countries, and really brings people and understanding to a different level.

Ellen Hoggard
Yeah. The other thing I’ll mention about exchange, just to plug it, is there’s 64 high school exchange programs like high school in the USA. We’re one of the newest, but we’re populated by a team that has, collectively over 75 years of experience running high school exchange programs. And we all came here because we wanted to work with people like you and GEC and the integrity and ethics that Southwestern brings to every business they support. Plus we are the only high school exchange program in the United States that offers our high school exchange students the beautiful LEAD program, and this knocks the socks off of every exchange student that comes. And what we really want to do is build the leaders of tomorrow to go back to their countries and really do their best for their countries.

Adam Outland
Yeah, the injection of entrepreneurial spirit that coming to the US and having that experience can change a country, absolutely. Yeah, thanks for sharing that. I think you know in your personal journey, you’ve moved into roles that involve leadership. How did that shift for you, Ellen, from going the student in the exchange, said, now we’re like handling the operations of the exchange.

Ellen Hoggard
That is a great question, and I will just say, first of all, with great humility, this was a quite a long journey. I think the reason I’m so happy sitting in this chair and so dedicated is because I’ve literally done every job in the industry. I worked from administrative assistant position at AFS. That was my first job. I ran all the end of state programs for 3000 AFS, ers. And when you work for a non profit, we’re very used to wearing about 20 hats at once, getting paid very little. You either have that work ethic or you don’t. And you learn a lot. You have to learn all the logistics. This is pre cell phone, pre internet, we had maps all over the walls, and you really had to learn a sense of strong logistical management that not only didn’t scare me, that inspired me, because I saw the kids having a magnificent time. AFS is old. They’re the oldest exchange program, but that was a brand new department that I built with two other with two guys and myself, and then I moved into another program, where it was a consortium of five exchange programs, running the Agency for International Development participant training program for people from the developing world to come and learn skill sets to take back to their home countries. Then I pivoted to Sister Cities ran their brand new intern Trainee program. By the time I got to this chair, to be honest, I’d done pretty much every job, and I did that on purpose because, like you guys say, you can’t teach what you don’t know, and you can’t leave where you won’t go. So being in a leadership position at this point in my career, the joy I have, in addition to my passion about international exchange, is watching my staff and helping my team become a 2.0 better version of themselves.

Adam Outland
So in that journey and holding all those different positions, what were some of the more challenging moments?

Ellen Hoggard
That’s a great question. Well, the immediate thing that comes to mind is I was in charge of over 400 students close well, around 400 students when COVID hit, and having to find a way to shepherd and care for 400 young people from 20 plus countries when none of us really knew the facts about what was happening, what was going on. We were working seven days a week, round the clock, having I remember having leadership global meetings at 7am every single day, and we got every student home safe and sound. Because as a mother, I’m a proud mom of two wonderful young ladies who are in their 20s now, I just felt the most important thing to do was to get all these children home to their families safe and sound, and then see how COVID unfolded. But I have to tell you that that was daunting. There was no road map. There was no advice that we could follow. I had to follow my gut instincts, knowing that as a mother, I wanted these children to be safe, and I had to keep everyone calm, not only were the students and families freaking out, we were all freaking out, right? The whole world was freaking out. So I had the students, first and foremost, the host families, the local coordinators, but the courage I saw during that time frame, you cannot believe what these families did for these kids, because we’d have a flight arranged, but airports were shutting down. Local airports were all shutting down. I had families driving kids to different states hours at a time, keeping them safe, getting them on planes. I had flights shut down when they’d already gotten to some of those airports, and they had to pivot and get them to another airport. And think about it. These people are doing this as volunteers, but these children became their children, I would say, as a young person, probably one of the biggest challenges for me. I got up the ladder quite quickly in my career to a very senior position, and I was working for a program that was taking very good care of me. I had a huge future there. But then I was asked to do things I wasn’t comfortable doing, and we all had that fork in the road moment in our life. I had to make a decision whether I wanted to stay and keep going in that direction where I can make a lot of money and do very well, but I realized that you only have one reputation, and you better really honor it. So I resigned from that position, I gave a month’s notice, and that was a pivotal moment in my life, where the road, there was a fork in the road, and I know I took the right fork. And when you’re up against these personal and professional challenges, you’ve got to remain true to your your soul, your integrity and your belief system, and then somehow things do always have a way of working out. And I’m no Pollyanna, life is bittersweet. You’ve got to saber this sweet and deal with the bitter.

Adam Outland
You know, this is kind of an interesting take on it too. But what are some of the bigger stereotypes that you’ve seen broken down because of the nature of hosting and bringing in a new culture like, you know, when I first came to this team. States, people just had this association in the community I lived in that Germany was like a communist country, right? Because it wasn’t so long ago that East Berlin was a thing, and I just had to kind of explain and share that it was, you know, socialism is a little different than communism. Even socialism, it was pretty capitalistic on the western side, whether or not that same form of structure would work great in the US. It works very well for German people. But what are some of those stereotypes that you feel like you’ve seen broken down as a as a result of your work?

Ellen Hoggard
That is such a great question, and may I please echo that Germany has one of the strongest economies in the world. So you know, hearkening back to when we started bringing these young people from they were truly communist countries at the time, I think people were astounded at how open minded the teenagers were. They expected them to come over here and kind of spew the party line or tell them that, Oh, it’s great where they live. I mean, they have so much to be proud of in their beautiful countries. No matter what your politics are, everyone has a beautiful culture and country to share. But I will say, on both sides, both the students that came and the students that still come, they were surprised quite often at how normal Americans are, and you know, we’re just regular people, and the streets are not paved with gold, at least not where our exchange students go. In fact, not, pretty much anywhere I’ve gone. So a lot of stereotypes were washed out on both sides. And over and over and over again, I’ve seen people say things like, I never dreamt that you would be open to going to a baseball game or or considering that. You know, here in America we we volunteer so much, one of the biggest impressions all of exchange programs make on young people is the spirit of volunteerism, and the kids embrace it and take it home or replicate it in their home countries worldwide, volunteerism is just not as big a thing. And people coming to this country, I want everyone to understand, are so impressed with you, all of us that wait you actually choose to volunteer at your church or in your community or as a boy scout or at school and help the homeless like this is astounding to people, and it’s a great virtue that we export. But when the kids come, I think American families and schools understand there’s so many beautiful things in their cultures that we can learn from like you mentioned about there are other economic systems that work just fine. It’s astounding to people here. It’s just a beautiful blending of the world globally. And I just think everyone comes away from these exchanges a happier, more fulfilled, wider viewed person.

Adam Outland
Yeah. I had a really interesting conversation with a friend of mine who is in the medical device arena, and he was explaining how a lot of doctors have very niche practices, and in the device world, he sometimes would see what other doctors did in different laboratories or different segments of medicine. And because of that, he would begin proposing the creation to his distributors of new medical tools, because they were being one way in a brain surgeon’s hands, but they could have equally been used for a spinal surgeon, and it just made me think of how often we miss an opportunity to learn by studying another culture or craft, that there are applications here in The US, for how we run our country, for how business operates. And we, you know, sometimes we do think everything we do is probably the best way, but that often is somewhat ignorant of the fact that there are some really good practices elsewhere that we can learn from. And likewise.

Ellen Hoggard
Well, I really love the fact that when kids come here, one of the things they always say to us is, am I What’s so polite here? Like they’re not used to customer customer service is not a thing in most of Europe the way it is here. And we’re so well, we assume this is the way it should always be, right? So we can certainly learn so much from other cultures, their beautiful food, their like, the efficiency of their systems in many cases, like you could eat off the floor of the trains or in the bathrooms. I was just in Rome, and you literally could eat off the floor of the bathrooms in the conference areas and in the public spaces. And I think of the world, this is a kind of silly analogy, but I think of my life and the world like this beautiful I love food, so I think of it as a beautiful menu. And if we choose from a, choose from B, choose from C, and then put together the best, most beautiful menu you could ever imagine, because we’re so lucky in this time in the world that we can travel. So much and bring young people and exchange students to us, so you can kind of take the best parts of things you like, consider the other things, maybe they’re things you don’t have as much love for. And okay, that’s fine, but the world’s a pretty great big menu, if you let it be, and then your life can be populated by the things that you’ve learned through the people you meet, through the places you go, through the students you host, and our host families, by the way, they end up going to their students, weddings. They go visit their students families. And when you typically go visit a student you’ve hosted, don’t even try to open your wallet. You will not be able to open your wallet, because their families are so grateful for the incredible love and experience and attention making their child a part of their family. When you go to their home, they’ll do everything for you. It’s and this goes. This is generational. This isn’t just for once. I have friends of mine who’ve been in exchange as long as I have who are now going, not only just to weddings, of their exchange, who’s getting married, but a few of them are starting to have their they call them their exchange grandbabies. I mean, it’s incredible.

Adam Outland
Lifelong connections. It’s huge. I want to go through, if you don’t mind, like maybe a quick lightning round of questions with you. When you travel internationally to another country, what are the top two things that you bring that might not always be on people’s list?

Ellen Hoggard
That’s a great question. Let’s see. What do I bring? Well, I need, like, snack bars through the day, I always bring snack like, really healthy snack bars. I stick them, I stick them all over my suitcase, and then, because I’m always on the move, I can’t necessarily always grab stuff quickly. So I always bring my snack bars. That’s number one. And the other thing is, I always, always bring super comfy shoes, because when you’re traveling around the world, I mean, for my business meetings, I have to have my fancy schmancy heels, right? But I bring a briefcase that what people will never know is my workout sneakers are always in the bottom of it. And because I’m walking everywhere, I love to walk, because that’s how you really see a place, right? You don’t see a place taking cabs or whatever. But I love to walk, so I’ll always wear my walking sneakers and my socks with my fancy outfit. And then just when I get to the building, I found a bed to sit down change to my heels and shove my sneakers. And you gotta your feet have to be comfortable and you have to have snacks. So those are my top two.

Adam Outland
That’s awesome. I love that. And then, do you have a favorite quote?

Ellen Hoggard
Yes, I do. I was so weird in high school that my quote was a Ralph Waldo Emerson quote under my picture. You know how we always used to put our I don’t know if they still do, well, yes, they do little quotes, but they’re usually like, you know, go go crusaders or go lions, or, you know, mine was this. We are that which we see build therefore your own world. Ralph Waldo Emerson, yeah.

Adam Outland
Fits really well with what you do, because your lens is a big part of how you you can’t color the world without seeing it through your eyes, right?

Ellen Hoggard
That’s right.

Adam Outland
This is an interesting one. Define, if you can, eloquently, what success means to you, and when you know you’ve achieved it?

Ellen Hoggard
That’s a great question. Success means to me, having done something in my life that I hope has positively impacted and made the world a better place in small ways and big ways, success means to me, honestly, I really am a strong believer that we have to put our families first, even though I’m you can see I’m so passionate about my career. Success is impacting the world through exchange. That’s my big success. But the bigger success for me, if I’m being really honest, is that my family respects me and is proud of me, and they know that they always come first. If I’ve accomplished that, which I try, then I think I will have been a successful person.

Adam Outland
I’m a little bit of a sci fi guy, I saw a limited run TV series, the whole theme, you could tell of this series, everybody’s on a spaceship. And what the author of the series really wanted you to understand is, you know, he just put it in a metal craft. But the reality is, Earth is flying through, you know, the universe, and it’s literally a living spaceship, right? I mean, we’re all on a rock collective. And all these dynamics that happen in this show kind of happen in real life on Earth, and that’s what makes the show interesting. And it just made me realize that, you know, we all, we don’t always realize that we’re all on the rocket ship together. Love that the exchange, the understanding of different cultures, the ability to build Ross relationships and learn from each others, is incredibly important to making sure we don’t blow up the spaceship.

Ellen Hoggard
I couldn’t say it better. Thank you for that. That’s absolutely true and we’re all so busy looking upwards at our own journey, I encourage us all to look to the left and look to the right as we hopefully move upwards in our in our evolution of ourselves and being better people, and as we climb whatever ladder it is that’s important to us, I urge everyone look to your left and look to your right, because guess what? You’ll see, like a million ladders of people all climbing up and trying to get there too. And we’re all trying to do but in a way, well, we all should try and do it in a way that helps each other, because maybe somebody’s ladder, one of the steps, is rickety. Maybe you want to hold your hand out and say, Can I help you up there? That’s something I was taught a long time ago in my own family that we’re here to help each other. And you know that’s replicating success, right? All the ladders going up together, let’s help each other.

Adam Outland
Yeah, there’s room to do that. Well, I really appreciate you taking the time to be our guest on the podcast today. Alan, thank you for sharing some of your wisdom. Thanks for the work that you do with international students, and I wish you the best of luck as you pursue your mission.

Ellen Hoggard
I can’t thank you enough. This has just been a joy, and I can see why they have you doing this job, because you’re wonderful at it. Thank you so much for having me today.

Adam Outland
You got it, absolutely.