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National Peace Corps Association > News > Community News > Sharing the Business Pursuits of RPCVs
Sharing the Business Pursuits of RPCVs
By Molly Mattessich on Thursday, June 16th, 2011
The National Peace Corps Association (NPCA) has featured a number of products for the 50th Anniversary either inspired by the Peace Corps or created and produced by Returned Peace Corps Volunteers (RPCVs). Many of you contacted us to say that you also have products that are Peace Corps-inspired and can we spread the world. There are several ways for you to market your products or services to the community.
The first and best way to market your product through the NPCA is with a Partnership Agreement. Several Peace Corps merchants donate a percentage of your purchase to the NPCA and they are featured on our official Merchandise page.
NPCA also has a special section of this website dedicated to RPCV & PCV discounts. We are willing to post special deals for the community in this space. If you have a coupon or deal that you want to offer to the Peace Corps community or NPCA members and be listed here, please let us know!
Additionally, you can market your products through the NPCA’s social networking communities, including NING, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.
I am an RPCV who served in Papua New Guinea 1991-1993. I am also a founder of the TN RPCVs, a non-profit organization in TN.
TFLI offers a $250 discount to RPCVs who want to enroll in the 145-hour TESL Certification Course at the Tennessee Foreign Language Institute (TFLI).
Here is the TESL website: http://tfli.org/teslhome.aspx
The information about RPCVs is near the bottom of the page. You can also send an e-mail to [email protected]
Looking to surf and make a difference? Make sure to visit Bodhi Surf School during your next vacation to Costa Rica. For large discounts just email us your name, country and year of service! We look forward to Awakening your Inner Surfer!
Berd Bears is the handicraft project of the Berd Women’s Resource Center Foundation, founded with help from PCVs. It is one of many projects that are promoted by Homeland Handicrafts (http://www.homelandhandicrafts.org/) which promotes many handicrafts produced by Women’s centers all over Armenia, including many that have PCVs.
Amber Davis Collins hails from Eton, Georgia (pronounced “E-tohn, Jaw-ja”). She attended Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College and the University of Georgia. As an undergrad, she interned at Escuela de Agricultura de la Región Tropical Húmeda (School of Agriculture for the Humid Tropical Region) in Costa Rica, and in graduate school she studied ecology in Brazil. Amber has a Master’s Degree in Agricultural Education and a Certificate in International Agriculture.
After graduation, Amber was accepted into Peace Corps Honduras’s Family Hillside Farming program. For the two years that she was there, Amber worked with women’s groups to improve nutrition through crop diversification. You can read about her experiences in the books “A Life Inspired: Tales of Peace Corps Service” and “Gather the Fruit One by One: Fifty Years of Amazing Peace Corps Stories.”
Many of Amber’s jewelry pieces are made with used postage stamps. Amber became interested in stamps during her Peace Corps service. Each Sunday, she spent countless hours writing letters to her family and friends back home. She mailed them back to Georgia with the most beautiful stamps that she could find. To her, the stamps were tiny pieces of artwork that she could share with her loved ones back home. Many of the miniature masterpieces incorporated into her collection are decades old. They come from all over the globe and reflect an appreciation of travel, culture, and art.
In addition to her website, Amber’s pendants are sold in the Fernbank Museum of Natural History Museum Store in Atlanta and at various art festivals throughout the city.
I am a lawyer helping clients with immigration matters. I’m located in Ohio, but I have clients all over the US and around the world.
BeadforLife was started in 2004 to help the poorest of the poor women in Uganda get out of poverty. We began developing the recyled paper beads into beautiful affordable jewelry which we marketed in home parites across North America. This forged a circle of engagement with women in Uganda. Over these years we have focused on income generation, entrepreneurial development, girls education, and increasing incomes of agricultural people affected by Joseph Kony’s terrible war.
I invite all of you who still have the Peace Corps spirit to make a difference to give a Bead Party. We totally support our hosts giving them hundreds of beads, recipes, videos, and music as well as ideas for a great time. The money that is raised is spent carefully to assist women to develop steady income streams and become independent of BeadforLife. Opportunities not hand outs.
Please join us by visiting us at http://www.BeadforLife.org.
Happy Thanksgiving.
Torkin Wakefield
India 29
Co-Founder
BeadforLife