CONTACT FAMILY
Local Contact Family
Living far away from home without the close connection of having your close family and friends around you are more challenging than most can imagine. However, most teenagers imagine that it must be the ideal life to live at a boarding school surrounded by friends, often “in real life” the feeling of missing more close adult contact takes over.
We cannot replace the relaxing and comfortable feeling of close family and yearlong friendships, but we can find you a family that you can meet for a coffee or dinner one to two times per month, and to whom you can reach out if you feel the need of extra support or just a friendly hug on a rainy day. This family will probably also celebrate you on your birthday and include you in some of their family traditions for Christmas, Easter, and other national holidays. Your contact family is also the place to go and stay, if you get sick and cannot stay in your room at the college till you get well.
Diverse group of Contact Families: GKX arranges contact between international students and local living families who are interested in introducing students to their daily life by inviting them for dinner on the weekends. The families can be a younger couple without children, a family with young children or teenagers, or a retired couple. It can also be a single person without a partner or children. Common for all families is that they are interested in getting to know foreigners, learning from your traditions and culture, sharing their Danish traditions and culture, and helping you understand the Danish way of living.
Strong Backgroup Check-up: Contact families are interviewed, screened, and prepared for the meetings. From experience, we know that often the best friendships often appear by coincidence in the meeting and also when opposites meet. Therefore we do not have a strong focus on shared interests, personality types etc. After the first meeting, we contact both the family and the student and check up on the meeting to ensure that you had a good time with each other. If not, we will introduce you to a new contact family.
The schools have several holidays during the year where the boarding schools closes down, and you must travel home to your parents. When having a Local Contact Family you can choose to spend the holiday with them. We cannot guarantee that they are not working during school breaks, but we are pretty sure that you will have an excellent and relaxing holiday with them. The only break where you have to travel home is for Christmas and New Year.
The Contact Family fee covers our work for locating, coordinating, and screening the family, but the Contact Families are volunteers. We offer the families are small budget to cover your entrance tickets, lunch etc., if you are visiting tourist spots, museums etc. together.
The Local Contact family is not included in the Support to eXplore program, but can be booked via eXplore Plus Webshop or our Partner Agencies.
