Twenty-six years ago, my wife and I left the United States as freshly minted newlyweds on our first big adventure. We were headed to a small international church in Thailand. If I'm honest, I had to look Thailand up on a map, because I had never heard of it. We went to serve as youth directors, and the youth group was full of kids from all over the world. Within weeks, those kids and their families had completely taken us in. We fell in love with them, and international community right away.
We had only just learned that TCKs existed, but we decided almost immediately that we wanted to raise our own children as TCKs. Third Culture Kids are a special group of people. The parents who raise them and the people who work alongside them are doing important work, and we wanted to be part of it. Four kids and four countries later (our work took us to Thailand, Hong Kong, the Cayman Islands, and South Korea) and we're still out here serving this special community!
Our own kids learned to pack a suitcase before they could ride a bike, made friends who scattered across the globe every June, and had to learn to answer the question "Where are you from?" in unique ways. Along the way, my wife and I have kept working with TCKs and their families - the last 17 years in international education. Every school, church, and community we joined had kids figuring out who they were between cultures, and parents trying to help them. Loving those families has been one of the great privileges of my life. Eventually our own four went out the door to university, and we got to watch them make the same transition we had watched so many other kids make.
When I started my doctorate in 2018, I chose to study the Third Culture Kid transition experience. I quickly found out how little had been written. The research I could find was scattered across journals, dissertations, websites, and conference talks, and much of the time I came up empty-handed. In 2018, while I was still learning how to research a topic with so little literature behind it, the idea for TCK Hub was born. If I was struggling this much to find what existed, what about a parent in their first year overseas? A counselor meeting their first TCK student? Or a teenager who had just found out there was a name for what they'd been feeling?
The vision for TCK Hub is simple: bring every resource we can find into one place, so that nobody has to come up empty-handed anymore. Books, podcasts, research, products, and services for TCKs and the people who love them should all be easy to find. TCK Hub isn't finished, and it never will be. It grows as this community adds to it. If you've written, recorded, researched, or built something for TCKs, we'd love to have it on TCK Hub!
If you know someone whose work belongs here, send them our way. Twenty-six years ago, a youth group full of TCKs took two young newlyweds in and changed the course of our lives. TCK Hub is my way of continuing to give to that community.
Dr. Richard Granger, Founder, TCK Hub
When I first came across TCK Hub and saw that it included my books, I wondered, What is this new platform?
As I started exploring, I discovered something that honestly left me in disbelief. Books, podcasts, research, products, and services related to Third Culture Kids were all gathered in one place.
For years, I had dreamed of a platform like this.
Through my work across different sectors, organizations, and companies, I noticed that people were often curating their own lists of TCK resources. Those lists are valuable, and there will always be a place for people to share their favorite books, podcasts, researchers, and resources. But I also found myself visiting ten different websites just to discover the newest books, podcasts, research, and resources related to TCKs. That is why TCK Hub feels so meaningful to me.
At its heart, TCK Hub is creating something the TCK community has needed for a long time: one place to discover the incredible breadth of resources available to Third Culture Kids and the people who support them. It is a platform that is being built with the community, and we are eager to hear thoughts, ideas, and suggestions along the way. What makes TCK Hub especially exciting is that it creates a space for people around the world to showcase their products, services, research, and resources. It is not limited to one country, organization, sector, or location. In that way, the platform reflects something fundamental about the TCK experience itself: it is global, diverse, and connected across borders.
For someone who is just beginning to learn about Third Culture Kids, TCK Hub can be a place to discover resources that help them understand this experience more deeply. For those creating resources for TCKs, it provides a place to share what they have developed with a wider audience. But perhaps what I find most meaningful is what this platform represents. It reminds us that TCKs are not alone.
There are stories waiting to be heard, research helping us understand the experience, resources offering practical support, and people around the world dedicating their work to helping TCKs thrive. Bringing those resources together does more than make them easier to find. It helps give language to the TCK experience. It creates connection. It helps normalize an experience that can sometimes feel difficult to explain. And it makes space not only to acknowledge the challenges of being a Third Culture Kid, but also to recognize and celebrate the richness, perspective, adaptability, and unique strengths that can come with that experience.
I am excited to see how TCK Hub continues to grow, and even more excited about what it could become as the TCK community continues to contribute to it. There is so much wisdom and so many resources already within this community. TCK Hub has the potential to help us find one another.
Megan Norton-Newbanks, Director of TCK Engagement & Services