International Youth Service

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International Youth Service is a company in Finland that provides a directory service for pen pals around the world.

[edit] Overview

Founded in 1952, IYS offers a service that allows young people between ten and eighteen years old to make contact with potential pen friends in other countries. In exchange for a per-address fee (which provides the company's revenue), IYS provides customers with the addresses of one or more persons—matched for age, interests, language abilities, and so on—to whom the customers can write. The customers' names and addresses are then added to a database to provide pen friends to a limited number of other customers, also matched individually.

The company has been based in Turku, Finland since its founding, and has become popular with foreign-language teachers as a source of pen friends for their students.