The Mejdi Tours company take pains to present both sides of the reality in these parts. With a Palestinian Muslim guide and an Israeli Jewish guide, it wasn't a typical Jerusalem tour. Mejdi was founded on the belief that tourism in conflict zones that addresses local experiences and beliefs can be a tool for intercultural understanding.

This summer, two groups of international food bloggers visited Israel for the first time on separate all-expense-paid trips... The goal of these trips and similar ones planned for the future, organizers say, is to expose influential writers to Israel through something as seemingly apolitical as food - and to encourage them to share their impressions of Israeli cuisine and culture with their millions of followers.

Following the devastating earthquake in Haiti in 2010, the Smithsonian Institution began a program to recover and restore artworks marred in the disaster. Now the Yale Center for British Art is hoping to create a cultural exchange program to teach Haitian artists restoration techniques that the artists can apply to damaged works in their home country.

The Friendship Communication Organization has organized activities for foreign diplomats in more than 100 cities and regions, most recently in Hetian,a town located in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. It works closely together with local governments in order to design programs conducive to cultural and commercial exchanges.

Hoping her celebrity will bring attention to the widening Syrian refugee crisis, actress and U.N. envoy Angelina Jolie spoke of the horrors that children, many of them orphans, have witnessed in Syria..."The priority needs relate to health care, food aid, shelter, water and sanitation, and education..."

“Since last year, we have partnered with NGOs like World Vision to sink boreholes in the affected areas so that residents can have enough water for their livestock and domestic use. We also encourage them to use the water to grow vegetables and maize to complement livestock keeping.”

The wide-ranging effort creates an American Chef Corps, a network of culinary leaders who could be deployed to promote U.S. cooking and agricultural products abroad. “They might meet with an embassy, cook a lunch, post blogs or [write] articles, speak at events,” says [U.S. Chief of Protocol Capricia Penavic] Marshall, listing the many ways participants might engage.

Entertainment marketing firm Cimarron hired three summer interns with Chinese backgrounds to comb social media sites and offer cultural insights as it expands overseas...Cimarron, which creates movie trailers as well as ad campaigns for such films as "The Dark Knight Rises," hopes the students will eventually help the company with its expansion into China.