Foreign Exchange was a weekly, half-hour international affairs

International relations

International relations is the study of relationships between countries, including the roles of states, inter-governmental organizations , international nongovernmental organizations , non-governmental organizations and multinational corporations...

 series on the Public Broadcasting Service

Public Broadcasting Service

The Public Broadcasting Service is an American non-profit public broadcasting television network with 354 member TV stations in the United States which hold collective ownership. Its headquarters is in Arlington, Virginia....

 (PBS) public television stations. The series premiered on April 1, 2005, and for three seasons was hosted by author and journalist Fareed Zakaria

Fareed Zakaria

Fareed Rafiq Zakaria is an Indian-American journalist and author. From 2000 to 2010, he was a columnist for Newsweek and editor of Newsweek International. In 2010 he became Editor-At-Large of Time magazine...

. Beginning in January 2008, journalist Daljit Dhaliwal

Daljit Dhaliwal

Daljit Dhaliwal is a British newsreader and television presenter.Dhaliwal is currently one of the news presenters for the Al-Jazeera English news service and broadcasts from Washington DC. Previously, she was the anchor chair of Worldfocus on PBS, which aired its last broadcast on 2 April 2010...

 became the new host and the title of the show was changed accordingly. The series explores current international issues in conversations with journalists, politicians, and other newsmakers, and examines America's role in an increasingly globalized world. The final episode aired October 9, 2009.

The show was produced by Azimuth Media and Oregon Public Broadcasting

Oregon Public Broadcasting

Oregon Public Broadcasting is the primary television and radio public broadcasting network for most of Oregon as well as southern Washington. With its headquarters and television studios in Portland, OPB consists of five full-power television stations, dozens of VHF or UHF translators, and over...

, and was distributed by American Public Television

American Public Television

American Public Television is the largest syndicator of programming for public television stations in the United States.-History:...

. Major funding was provided by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation

William and Flora Hewlett Foundation

The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation is a private foundation, established by Hewlett-Packard cofounder William Reddington Hewlett and his wife Flora Lamson Hewlett in 1967. The Hewlett Foundation awards grants to support educational and cultural institutions and to advance certain social and...

. Additional support from the Ford Foundation

Ford Foundation

The Ford Foundation is a private foundation incorporated in Michigan and based in New York City created to fund programs that were chartered in 1936 by Edsel Ford and Henry Ford....

 and Carnegie Corporation of New York

Carnegie Corporation of New York

Carnegie Corporation of New York, which was established by Andrew Carnegie in 1911 "to promote the advancement and diffusion of knowledge and understanding," is one of the oldest, largest and most influential of American foundations...

.

Through a partnership with the citizen journalism

Citizen journalism

Citizen journalism is the concept of members of the public "playing an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, analyzing and disseminating news and information," according to the seminal 2003 report We Media: How Audiences are Shaping the Future of News and Information...

 website Helium.com

Helium.com

Helium.com, Inc. is a website where active writers are paid for contributing articles, and visitors can read these articles for free. User generated content in a given title is rated up or down by other writers in a form of peer review system. As with social news sites like Digg or Reddit, user...

 the show offered viewers an opportunity to get their voices heard on the most pressing global issues. The issues were chosen by Foreign Exchange and ranged from Kosovo

Kosovo

Kosovo is a region in southeastern Europe. Part of the Ottoman Empire for more than five centuries, later the Autonomous Province of Kosovo and Metohija within Serbia...

 as an inspiration to other independence movements in the world to the future of socialism

Socialism

Socialism is an economic system characterized by social ownership of the means of production and cooperative management of the economy; or a political philosophy advocating such a system. "Social ownership" may refer to any one of, or a combination of, the following: cooperative enterprises,...

 in Latin America

Latin America

Latin America is a region of the Americas where Romance languages  – particularly Spanish and Portuguese, and variably French – are primarily spoken. Latin America has an area of approximately 21,069,500 km² , almost 3.9% of the Earth's surface or 14.1% of its land surface area...

. Essays were written and rated on Helium.com, and the best essays were featured on the show.