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Welcome to the West of Scotland Friendship Force Web Site.

If you are already a member, you can skip what follows, because you should know it. But the menu on the left, will take you to a letter from the president of West of Scotland Friendship Force, or to an article about how the site is structured.

Friendship Force is an organisation simple in concept and designed to help people - ordinary people - get to know each other better, and to understand something of each other's culture and customs.

It achieves this objective primarily through having Friendship Force Clubs throughout the world. Presently there are nearly 400 clubs worldwide. All are run by volunteers and the organisation, although not registered in the UK as a charity, operates globally as a not-for-profit organisation.

Each year, usually, a club will go to visit another club, for a week. The visitors stay in the homes of the members being visited and, although in the week there are some organised sightseeing trips, there are also days set aside as free with hosts. These days are very important and are not just rest days in a busy programme. They are time for the visitors to share in the life of the hosts, or to visit, with their hosts, places or people they would like to see.

As has already been stated, the concept is simple; but to make it work effectively is the job of a small group of paid people in Atlanta, the power-source of Friendship Force exchanges and part with its own name to distinguish it from the clubs, Friendship Force International. There are people there whose task is to match up where in the world clubs would like to go, with where in the world could host them.

To give you some idea of the size of the organization, have a guess at how many visitors travelled in 2007 - the last year for which we presently have full statistics, then press the slide button below to see the answer.