Why we are doing this

On 11 September 2026, seventy years have passed since the White House Conference in Washington DC that gave rise to People to People International. President Eisenhower’s own words from that day survive in PTPI’s files: “The purpose of this meeting is the most worthwhile purpose there is in the world today: to help build the road to peace, to help build the road to an enduring peace.”

Source: PTPI Case for Support, 2015.

Most of PTPI’s seventy-year history exists only in paper files, chapter archives and the memories of long-serving volunteers, not in one place PTPI itself can draw on. Ahead of this anniversary, we set out to find, check and preserve as much of it as we could before more of it is lost. This report sets out how that work is being done and what has come to light so far, so the wider PTPI family can see the process and add to it.

How we are doing it

The work runs on four tracks at once. Technology does much of the searching. Every result is checked by a person before it is filed, and nothing is published outward until it is confirmed. Facts we cannot verify with confidence are marked [VERIFY] in our working files rather than presented as settled.

1. Direct chapter outreach

We have written to chapters asking for a short account of their own history, along with any early photographs or records they hold. Greater Phoenix, Arizona was the first to reply, on 30 August 2026. Ruth Allen, the chapter’s Program Coordinator and Treasurer, sent a link to the chapter’s own newsletter and travel archive, which runs back to 2005, together with photographs from the September 2003 PTPI Americas Conference in New Orleans, where the chapter received the International Visitors Program Award for hosting nineteen Russian students and teachers for a month of homestays, English lessons and cultural exchange. Her reply is the model we hope other chapters will follow.

2. Chapter and social media page reviews

Alongside direct replies, we are working through chapter websites and public social media pages to recover posts, photographs and programme records that a chapter may not think to send in unprompted. Every name we record is one the chapter’s own page already made public, in an official or organising capacity; personal contact details and anything sensitive about a named individual are left out. Nothing is published until it has been checked and dated.

3. Retained internal archives

PTPI’s own files hold earlier governance material that had fallen out of daily use but was never destroyed. We have pulled together a record covering the European Council’s own minutes from 2008 to 2020, PTPI’s Global Annual Reports, and PTPI Europe’s donor and fundraising communications.

4. Dictated paper notes

Some material exists only on paper. Where that is the case, it is being read aloud and transcribed rather than left to degrade further. A first set of notes, dated 1987, has been reviewed for this report; more will follow as they come to light.

How we label the evidence

Not every fact recovered so far carries the same weight of proof. Each chapter profile below is marked with one of three labels, so readers can see at a glance how well a claim is currently supported.

A label describes how well a fact is currently supported, not how important it is, and is revised as more material comes in.

The founding story, in the founders’ own words

PTPI traces its origins to the White House Conference held on 11 September 1956. The People to People initiative initially operated under the United States Information Agency. People to People International was incorporated as a nonprofit organisation in Missouri on 31 October 1961, and its offices moved from Washington DC to Kansas City.

Source: PTPI Case for Support, 2015.

Eisenhower’s family kept a connection to PTPI long after: Mamie Eisenhower was named honorary founder and attended annual meetings until shortly before her death in 1979, and suggested that her granddaughter, Susan Eisenhower, join the board, which she did, supporting both the high school Student Ambassador programme and board deliberations.

Today, People to People International operates as a Belgian AISBL. Its Global Coordination Centre in Brussels supports coordination, governance, shared standards and visibility across a distributed network of autonomous chapters.

This report follows the history of the wider PTPI movement and chapter network. It does not suggest that every former structure, programme or legal entity continued unchanged.

What chapters themselves have kept

Six chapters illustrate what these records can hold, chosen to span different decades, continents and kinds of activity. Six more chapters, and our findings on PTPI’s ties to Japan, appear in the appendix at the end of this report.

A family bigger than we knew

Chapter by chapter, we keep finding that today’s chapters are already connected to each other, sometimes without realising it. PTPI Cheonan, Korea and PTPI Dhaka, Bangladesh signed a formal sisterhood agreement on 17 November 2022. PTPI Delaware and PTPI Togo’s Kpome community have worked together for close to forty years. PTPI Interlaken, Switzerland and a chapter in Bucharest, Romania have called each other sister chapters since 1991. PTPI Milan, Italy and PTPI Mombasa, Kenya have sustained a girls’-education partnership since at least 2010, and Greater Phoenix, Arizona’s 2003 hosting of Russian visitors led directly to a sister chapter being formed in Vladivostok, Russia.

These ties are still emerging as we go. If your chapter has a sister-chapter relationship we have not yet recorded, let us know.

What this adds up to

The material recovered so far gives us dated evidence from every decade of PTPI’s history, from its founding in 1956 to active chapter programmes in 2026. Significant gaps remain within those decades.

We hold source-checked activity records for twelve chapters across the Americas, Europe, Asia and Africa: Greater Phoenix, Delaware, Greater Kansas City, Switzerland, Milan, Tallinn, Sternberk, Cheonan, Tainan, Denmark, Mombasa and Bogota. Six appear in full above; six more, together with our findings on PTPI’s ties to Japan, appear in the appendix.

We also hold a European governance record running from 2008 to 2020, and PTPI’s own Global Annual Report for 2014, which recorded 267 chapters and 23,718 members worldwide, active in 45 countries on five continents. PTPI’s 2015 Case for Support separately recorded 274 chapters, 23,700 participants worldwide, and activity in 160 countries. Both are historical snapshots of the network at a point in time. Neither describes today’s network, and neither should be read as current.

None of this replaces a chapter’s own memory of itself. It is a start.

Recovery snapshot

A plain count of what has been reviewed so far. Only figures we can count reliably are shown here.

These are counts of records in our own files, not measures of PTPI’s full history.

What we do not have yet

• Most chapters have not yet been reached, reviewed or asked. What we have found so far is the beginning of the record, not the whole of it.
• A small number of founding dates remain unconfirmed, including Delaware’s own. Where a source gives two possible readings, we record both rather than choose one.
• Photograph, video and audio archives are still largely untouched, chapter by chapter and in PTPI’s own files. We do not yet have a historical photograph we are confident is genuinely PTPI’s own and cleared to publish. A future version should carry at least three: an early PTPI or White House Conference image, a Worldwide Conference or exchange image, and a chapter-led community project image, each with its date, location, source and permission to use it recorded alongside it.
• A number of details drawn from social media or a single source are marked [VERIFY] in our working files and are not used in any published material until independently confirmed.
• Some chapters mentioned to us directly are not yet in our files at all. We have found no record so far of a youth chapter said to have operated in Rabat, Morocco. If it existed, we would welcome whatever anyone can send us.
• Four sources referred to us are not yet in our project archive: a PTPI Global Annual Report for 2016, PTPI Europe Annual Reports for 2019 and 2021, and a document titled ‘70 Years of People, Places and Possibility’. Until we can review them, no figures attributed to them appear in this report. If you hold a copy, please send it to us.

Where a detail is not yet independently confirmed, an exact date, a name, a figure, we hold it back rather than publish it provisionally. The aim is a record that chapters, members and anyone checking our facts can rely on, not a fast one.

How you can help

We are looking for the material only chapters and long-serving members hold: photographs, programme books, newsletters, and personal recollections dated to a place and a time.

Some chapters we have not heard from in years. If that is you, we would love to hear from you again.

Next steps

• Continue the chapter-by-chapter outreach and page review, logging and dating each confirmed finding as it is checked.
• Follow up with chapters that have not yet replied.
• Transcribe further paper material as it comes to light.
• Cross-check chapter replies against what PTPI’s own files already hold, to confirm names, dates and locations before anything is published.

Appendix: further chapters recovered so far

These six chapters are held to the same evidence standard as those in the main report; they appear here to keep the main report shorter and easier to read.

PTPI’s ties to Japan