An Octopus Never Forgets
It took Gene Carl Feldman an hour to walk around the tiny Western Samoan island of Manono, where he received his Peace Corps training, but only if he politely refused the countless invitations he received to stop and eat at each and every home he passed. And most of those meals were either grown or raised on the island or caught in the nearby lagoon. Manono was Gene's 1974 training site. "As a 21-year-old kid from New York City, life on the island of Manono was far from anything that I had ever experienced." His favorite meal was fai'ai fe'e,...
Closing the Door to Humanitarian Immigration
Over the past year and a half, drastic changes in government policy have affected millions of immigrants living in the United States, as well as countless others who held hopes of entry. These developments have impacted not only those who aspired to study or work here, or secure greater opportunities for their families, but also refugees and asylum seekers—survivors of violence and persecution in their home countries, hoping to find safety here in the U.S. On the first day of his current term in office, Donald Trump initiated what the New York Times has called “the harshest crackdown on immigrants...
The Idea That Wouldn’t Die
Let’s face it: Peace Corps has seen better days. In the past year, six programs have announced closures or canceled cohorts, including South Africa, Mozambique, and Ethiopia—a host country since 1962—and dozens of staff positions have been cut both at headquarters and abroad. The agency, once firmly independent, has seen the State Department and Congress pledge closer oversight. Recruitment is down, with more than half (55 percent) of available Volunteer placements going unfilled, compared with just 6 percent in 2019. But before we declare the end of JFK’s bold experiment, consider another truth in this 65-year story: Peace Corps has...
Hard Corps
A Domestic Version of Peace Corps In February 2026, Peace Corps announced the launch of its newest program: The Tech Prosperity Corps. This new service opportunity, which aims to facilitate international development and economic growth in Peace Corps host countries through the adoption of artificial intelligence, marks the latest example of Peace Corps’ continuing legacy today. In the decades since Peace Corps’ founding in 1961, its success has sparked a movement of service-based organizations, many of which have incorporated the word “corps” into their name. The word “corps” itself has long carried associations of shared mission, discipline, and collective identity....
The Advocate
When I graduated from college, I briefly considered joining Peace Corps. After some reflection, my decision was clear: “Spend two years living remotely in a foreign country? Absolutely not!” I could never have imagined that seven years later I would be on a tiny island in the Federated States of Micronesia starting service. Similarly, in 2003, when I was hired to help rebuild the advocacy program at the National Peace Corps Association (NPCA), it would have been hard for me to foresee that I’d close out my career running NPCA’s advocacy efforts more than twenty years later, in 2026, having...
When Caucasian Doesn’t Mean White
I was three months into my Peace Corps assignment in Georgia in 2003 when I first learned white folks back home were not, in fact, the real Caucasians. I was sitting in a small classroom in the village of Vale with some older teenagers who had recently traveled to Russia. During their time working in construction there they told me they were often called “Chorniy,” the Russian word for the color black. Contextually, the phrase can also be deployed as a slur against people from the Caucasus region. Every day, these young men told me they were racially harassed and...
Peace Corps Returns to Syunik
When 30 American volunteers were sworn into the U.S. Peace Corps in Yerevan on May 21st, one detail stood out above the rest: for the first time in six years, some of them would be deployed to Syunik—Armenia's southernmost region, bordering both Azerbaijan and Iran, and long at the center of one of the post-Soviet world's most protracted territorial disputes. Before the ceremony ended, they sang the Armenian national anthem alongside the crowd; a small but telling sign of the months they'd already spent immersing themselves in a language and a culture, most Americans know little about. The last Peace...
Posters for Peace
As Peace Corps launches a retro recruiting campaign to mark its 65th anniversary, the art of the poster has always been key. A past exhibition by ArtReach Gallery and the Museum of the Peace Corps Experience did more than trace marketing materials for the agency. In images and words — including works by renowned artists Peter Max and Shepard Fairey — it explores how we think about and talk about the idea of peace itself. And how we make it. To celebrate the 50th anniversary of Peace Corps in 2011, Shepard Fairey created a poster that was widely distributed across...
WorldView Guide to Book Publishing
Returned Volunteers have been shaping America’s view of the world for decades, and their stories are more essential now than ever. It doesn't matter who you are or how much you have written; facing a blank page to tell the story of your life can be intimidating. We're here to reassure you that, as a Returned Peace Corps Volunteer, you have a great story to tell. The key question is where to start. The WorldView Guide to Writing (and Writers), produced by the National Peace Corps Association, is an in-depth multimedia experience to help RPCVs and others explore the pursuit of writing,...
Kinder-Resilient
VAVA'U, TONGA — The village of Tu'anuku ushered in a new era for early childhood education in early February, celebrating the soft opening of a brand-new, resilient kindergarten facility. The milestone marks the culmination of an international collaborative effort spearheaded by Friends of Tonga (FoT), a National Peace Corps Association-affiliated non-profit operating out of Laurel, Maryland. Founded and operated by Returned Peace Corps Volunteers (RPCVs), FoT remains dedicated to sustaining the spirit of service long after their initial tenure in the Kingdom. FoT built their first climate-resilient kindergarten in Ta’anga, ‘Eua back in 2021, directly responding to the damage from...