Every year the South Africa Community Fund custom designs peace building trips for teams of university students. Colleges and universities typically organize teams from 10 to 20 members to go to South Africa for trips that last from one to two months. The South Africa Community Fund creates and manages the entire team experience from beginning to end, including pre-trip training at the university, assistance in fundraising, the in-country experience and debriefing at the end of the project.

Team members pair up to stay in local homes for the duration of the trip. Breakfast and dinners are spent with the host families. The daytime schedule—Monday through Friday—is packed with field trips to organizations that are working on social transformation issues. Team members get up close to the community activists, government officials, educators, health professionals, clergy and artists who are helping the new South Africa emerge from the years of struggle in Apartheid. Team members join one of the weekend peace building retreats with local university students, meet with members of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the Tutu Peace Centre. Local excursions include a boat trip to Robben Island where Nelson Mandela was imprisoned, a guided visit to the South Africa National Gallery to study resistance art that was banned during the Apartheid years, tours of government monuments that were designed to validate Apartheid and outings to emerging theatre and music productions by the new voices of South Africa.

Each team participates in a community service project. These projects can include construction of homes, volunteering at an AIDS hospice for infants or day care programs, environmental service, vacation camps for youth or community development efforts. Teams typically have no program content structured for the evenings or weekends so that relationships can develop with the host families.

Being a part of a college team in a cross cultural program can be challenging emotionally and can confront some dearly held values. The South Africa Community Fund is very intentional in designing the team experience in a way that invites participants to journey deeper into their own core identity and myths that have been constructed over time to serve a personal world view. We believe that peace building requires both social and personal transformation, and that to be a student of peace building is to make a personal investment that not only increases head knowledge but that demands heart work as well. The peace building team experience helps students go back to their home institutions and country of origin with a new sense of what peace building could look like in their own context. Some colleges arrange for academic credit for their students who go on the peace building trips. The South Africa Community Fund is able to assist in the design of curriculum that satisfies academic requirements.