Polyglot
-
National Peace Corps Association > News > Polyglot > Survey Results Are In: Peace Corps’ Impact Over 50 Years
Survey Results Are In: Peace Corps’ Impact Over 50 Years
By Molly Mattessich on Tuesday, September 20th, 2011
A Call to Peace: Perspectives of Volunteers on the Peace Corps at 50 – A report on the largest independent survey ever conducted to assess the impact of the Peace Corps over its 50 year history and beyond
How did serving in the Peace Corps change the direction of your life?
What motivated you to leave the United States for two years to serve in a developing country with the Peace Corps?
Why should the Peace Corps expand? Why not?
To find out the answer to these questions, the National Peace Corps Association and Civic Enterprises asked the people who know Peace Corps best: the returned Volunteers themselves. We received an overwhelming response from 11,000 participants - over 5% of all people who served as Peace Corps Volunteers. This data will be instrumental in helping to shape the priorities for the Peace Corps and the U.S. government for generations to come.
Download the report, A Call to Peace:
Peace as the Overriding Purpose
- 80% said their service was effective in promoting a better understanding of Americans in the communities where they served and an almost equal number said their service helped promote a better understanding of other peoples on the part of Americans
- 59% said their service was effective in helping other communities meet their need for trained workers
A Transformative Experience
- 90% of RPCVs rated their Peace Corps experience as excellent or very good
- 98% would recommend the Peace Corps to their child, grandchild or other close family member
Certainly, the Peace Corps is not just a two year experience, but one that impacts not only communities but individuals for the rest of their lives. During the 50th Anniversary year of the Peace Corps, there is no better time than now to ask where the Peace Corps has been, and the direction that it should take for the next 50 years.
What do YOU think? Do you agree with the survey? Read the survey results now and use the comments space below to share your own thoughts and experiences.
- Read an op-ed by the lead authors in the Huffington Post: A Call to Peace
- Read about A Call to Peace on the White House Office of Public Engagement Blog.
- See what the Chronicle of Philanthropy has to say.
Find ways to take action in support of the Peace Corps and the ServiceWorld.org international service campaign on our Advocacy page.
To support the National Peace Corps Association, start or renew your Membership now!
This report was generously supported by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, the Case Foundation, the MCJ Amelior Foundation, AARP, the Center for Strategic Philanthropy and Civil Society at the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University, and the Heller School for Social Policy and Management at Brandeis University.
Great research report. As a RPVC (Ukraine 2009-2011) I can second the positives, and would add my voice to the importance of recruiting senior volunteers! Being a бабушка, a grandmother, opened many doors on all levels, from working at a camp for kids to working on a human rights project and starting an English Club in Starobelsk, far-eastern Ukraine. The respect I received i returned many times over, and watched the love grow! Ukrainians and Americans united, at the grassroots level, working together from the bottom up for positive social change.
This report portrayed my feelings about my service in Kenya (1990-1992). Today, 21 years after my arrival in Kenya, I am still “Auntie” to Kim, who is attending college due to my small (by our standards) contribution of his school fees. We are Facebook friends, and Skype from time to time – I am positive that he will have a future filled with choices. His mom (my “Kenyan sister”) and I are still close. Peace Corps definitely played a strong hand in shaping my life in a positive way, and sharing my experiences with friends, schools and other organizations helps “bring it home”. As a mid-life PCV (I began at age 38), I would emphasize the strong contributions that we more experienced volunteers can make.
Our PC Program (1965-68)in Brazil was very successful and about half of our group extended for a 3rd yr to continue with the work. We worked with organizing 4-H type clubs in rural villages and schools. We also did work with community development. Many in our group have continued to have strong ties with our counter-parts in Brazil. I have continued to work with education projects here in the states for those who have been neglected in our traditional school settings. I have worked with Adult Education, English as a 2nd Language and Citizenship/Naturalization classes. I am sure the Peace Corps has influenced what I am and have done in my life since returning to the states.
The Report does a great job describing the Peace Corps experience. I was 54 and my wife, Anna 52, when we got volunteer assignments to Kenya in 1979. Son John was already a volunteer in Ecuador. Anna was more outgoing and a much better student of Swahili. Returning to our Taita Hills site 10 years later, we found that Anna’s teaching, the making of large water storage jars had become standard practice, and my introduction of avocados as high calorie food for infants was continuing. Back at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo, I introduced the teaching of World Food Politics to show the relationship of careers of agriculture and engineering students. Anna died in 2003.
My Peace Corps experience (Sergipe, Brazil 1967-69) was filled with new and exciting experiences every day. Since I returned 42 years ago, I doubt a day has gone by that I haven’t thought about Peace Corps and Brazil.
When I left PC, I feared that my Brazilian high school students would have nowhere to go after graduation. Our town had no industry and few businesses. Graduates would have to move to the capital city and pay tuition, room and board to continue learning, a hardship for many of them. But somehow, nearly every one of them did. They became doctors, nurses, lawyers, health service workers, bankers, agronomists, engineers, teachers, professors, also a meteorologist and a minister of agriculture and more. Each one is contributing to Brazil’s current success.
In August 2011, I made my first trip back, along with an RPCV who overlapped one year in the same town. We had no idea what an impact we had made in the town and especially on our students, yet we were treated like royalty and honored with two large reception dinners, one in the capital city and one in our interior PC site. Yet, we could not accept the credit. We, of course, gained more than we gave. Maybe we opened the townspeople’s eyes to possibilities they hadn’t thought feasible, but in the end, the Brazilians made change happen.
PC was an experience of a lifetime and I wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone who asks. In ‘Innocents Abroad’ Mark Twain said: “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness… Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.”
Living/working in another culture unlocked the door to the entire world for me. And the fact that I made a difference in Brazil made it doubly rewarding.
I was a PC Volunteer, 1962-’64, in the (first) Senegal 1 project. Although my two-year tour was a valuable and useful period of my service to both myself and the Senegalese people, I must say that one of the major problems with the project was the PC Country Project Director during my two years there. Although one can surmise that in (only) this second year of the Peace Corps, we (PC & PCVs!) were part of an initial State Department effort to establish the Peace Corps program, worldwide, and we were “babes in the woods” as initiators and in “the experiment”–which, fortunately has become very practical, useful and successful program during the past half-century. However, our PC Country Director did not speak French, in the most francophone country in Africa, and did not communicate well with host country nationals or the ministries, etc. This certainly was a serious handicap–which he did not seem to overcome in the two years that he was there. Fortunately, PC/Washington did send experienced American ex-pats to interview many of the PCVs, and also hired a Dr. Carter with strong people and French language skills to come to Senegal and assist the Country Director. I do not think that finding more qualified Country Directors has been an ongoing problem in the Peace Corps for a long time now, and so we do learn from our initial errors.
Pleased to have participated in the Peace Corps, and yes, it did change my life!
At the recent 50th reunion I found no one who still had a relationship with the nationals he or she knew in their host countries. The question was never asked. We were asked if we had returned, but not if we still had a continual and abiding relationship with our friends in our host countries. That is the essence of the Peace Corps idea. Forty-five years of friendship, support, telephone calls and visits make a difference.
Enjoyed my Peace Corps career in Fiji during 1972-1973. It changed my life.
My first country of service, Cameroon, 1967-069, had just come through a rebellion and the town I was assigned to, Mbouda, was where tribal chiefs were required to relocate to. My house was a modern brick house surrounded by a fence. Electricity in the evening, if there was petrol for the town generator.
I learned from my students that my houseboy was stealing from me and had to fire him. I decided to accept a fellow teacher’s offer to share his houseboy for cleaning and laundry, but do my own cooking and marketing. Jean-Pierre was an excellent and hard worker. He stuttered, and this bothered him, so I asked my mother to see if there were any books on the subject that she could send me. Unfortunately, there was no cure, but at lest he knew there were famous people who stuttered and that it was not harmful.
Jean-Pierre married and built his house out of the usual mud bricks he made himself. I gave him the money for a tin roof. He and his wife had a baby girl whom he wanted to name after me: Ramona. I suggestd he name her after my mother, Aurore, which he did.
I was not able to keep in touch with my Cameroon friends and students, in part because of my year’s service in Chad and being in different places for PC training in the summers of 1969 and 1970.
I would love to go back for a visit, though Mbouda is no longer the prefect capital. It seems to remain a main connection point for travel to Bamenda from the eastern part of Cameroon, including Yaounde.
I have had the good fortune to reconnect with a Dominican that I had grown close to. The reconnect came through Facebook. I am going to the Dominican Republic in February for the 50th anniversary celebration and we will be seeing each other.
Served (with distinction) as teacher at St Mary’s High School, Sanniquellie, Nimba County, Liberia, 1976-79 (just before the troubles began). The President of Liberia, William Tolbert, dedicated the school library I had been working on as an extra project. That was the high-point of my tour.
My younger sister Jean and I had both graduated from the mediocre American School of Guatemala in the early 1970s. Dad was a USAID capital development officer, involved with the Central American Common Market. Before moving to Guatemala we lived in the Panama and Jamaica. We liked the schools in both countries a lot, especially the progressive British-style one in Jamaica. In Panama we attended schools in the Canal Zone. I attened the US Army-run Curundu Junior High, the most modern in the world at the time, complete with huge geodesic dome. In contrast the school in Jamaica was an old colonial era house and simple cinder block classrooms. My parents moved to Kenya after Guatemala, and my sister and got to visit them there – at US gov’t expense!
I attended graduate school in DC after the Peace Corps. I remember going to a conference about Liberia. A State Department official was present. He strongly suggested that a Liberia PCV (no, not me) had played an indirect role in Tolbert’s overthrow and assassination. The State Department had questioned this RPCV. Beyond that, I don’t anything more on the issue.