The Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program Was Supposed to Benefit Returned Volunteers. It Hasn’t.
So returned Volunteers are rallying to try to fix that. And NPCA is working with them to help. By Jonathan Pearson In October 2021, the U.S. Department of Education announced an overhaul of the troubled Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) program. Applicants who devote ten years of work in the public service sector (and make 120 qualifying student loan payments during that time) are eligible to have further loan payments forgiven. In a press release, Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said the changes were an attempt to live up to the promise of the program and could impact more than 550,000 borrowers. But,...
WorldView Magazine Earns Top Honors for Editorial and Design Excellence in 2021 FOLIO Magazine Awards
An EDDIE award recognizing a series of stories about Volunteers evacuated from around the world. And a cover asking “What’s the Role of Peace Corps Now?” These awards mark the first time that the magazine published for the Peace Corps community has earned these top honors. By NPCA Staff For the first time in its more than three-decade history, WorldView magazine has brought home top honors in the FOLIO Awards honoring magazine editorial and design excellence. Published by National Peace Corps Association, WorldView is a winner of both an EDDIE and OZZIE in the 2021 awards. WorldView earned EDDIE top honors...
Vishakha Wavde: “This journey has brought me to consider what more I can do.”
Peace Corps Volunteer in Malawi (2018–20) | Peace Corps Response Volunteer with FEMA in United States (2021) As told to Emi Krishnamurthy Photo: Vishakha Wavde has worked in community outreach efforts with FEMA in the U.S. Photo by Eli Wittum I have been in the health sector my whole life. I’ve been a physical therapist in Chicago since emigrating to the U.S. from India 27 years ago. In 2020, after being evacuated from Malawi, where I served as a community health advisor, I continued as a physical therapist until I found the opportunity to work with FEMA and the...
“Peace Corps is Just Like Netflix!”
Mapping and reinventing cultures. Radical responsibility. Counting tiles and waiting in line. That long lunch may be your ticket. And other insights from a conversation with business thinker Erin Meyer. In Erin Meyer’s first book, there’s a point where she assumes the persona of a Danish designer exasperated at how much time she’s having to spend socializing with would-be manufacturing partners in Nigeria: “Can’t we just get down to business and sign a contract?” The Culture Map: Breaking Through the Invisible Boundaries of Global Business answers that by mapping cultural expectations around the world when it comes to leading or...
Why Does Service Matter?
From Peace Corps to AmeriCorps to envisioning a quantum leap: 1 million people in the U.S. serving every year — and changing the culture and ethos of service. So how do we get there? A conversation with Mark Gearan and Keri Lowry. By Steven Boyd Saum In 2017, the U.S. government undertook the first-ever comprehensive and holistic review of all forms of service to the nation, and Congress wrote into law the creation of the National Commission on Military, National, and Public Service. Over many months, this 11-member bipartisan commission embarked on visits to 42 cities in 22...
President’s Letter: Service, Impact, and the Work Ahead
This September, we gather to honor six decades of Peace Corps service in communities around the world. Right now, we need to honor Peace Corps ideals by helping in humanitarian crises. By Glenn Blumhorst Photo: A girl from Afghanistan at a UN High Commissioner for Refugees camp in 2002. Photo by Caleb Kenna As this edition of WorldView magazine was wrapping up in August, we marked World Humanitarian Day — an occasion to advocate for the survival, well-being, and dignity of people affected by crises. A devastating earthquake hit Haiti; thousands were killed and injured. In Afghanistan, after the Taliban’s lightning offensive,...
Judith Jones: “Literacy will improve countries, economies, and social situations.”
Judith Jones Peace Corps Response Volunteer in Belize (2018–20) | Peace Corps Response Volunteer with FEMA in Oregon, United States (2021) As told to Sarah Steindl Photo: Teacher and student at work in Belize. Photo courtesy Judith Jones My Peace Corps journey was a little bit different. I originally applied to be a two-year Volunteer in Jamaica, and I got rejected for medical reasons. I appealed, and I lost that decision. I was devastated because this was something that I really wanted to do in my retirement. Then out of the blue, a month later, a friend who works for...
Peace Corps Response: An anniversary. A pandemic. A historic moment for this program launched a quarter century ago.
Short-term, high-impact. Now marking 25 years since its founding. By Steven Boyd Saum Photo by Christian Farnsworth A quarter century ago, at a midsummer White House Rose Garden ceremony attended by President Bill Clinton and Sargent Shriver, first director of the Peace Corps, a new type of Peace Corps service was announced to the world: Crisis Corps. Short-term, high-impact, it was, as then-Peace Corps Director Mark Gearan explained, “an effort to harness the enormous experience, skills, motivation, and talents that the Peace Corps, including its returned Volunteer ranks, possesses, and bring them to bear in an organized fashion during...
Metaphors for Thought
As a Peace Corps Volunteer in south India in the mid-1960s, Joel Shapiro taught villagers how to dig latrines, build smokeless ovens, and utilize night soil for more productive vegetable gardens, among other sustainability initiatives. More than 50 years later, his sculptures and works on paper are in the permanent collections of museums all over the world: New York City’s Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Whitney Museum of American Art; down south at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas; out west at California’s Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and across the Atlantic at the Tate...
From the Editor: Crisis and Response
Beginnings. Good sense. And the second time in history that Peace Corps Volunteers have been deployed in the United States. By Steven Boyd Saum Photo from 1994: A Rwandan refugee camp in eastern Zaire. Photo courtesy CDC Here’s an instructive but heart-wrenching place to start, if we want to tell the big story at the center of this edition of WorldView. It’s one of crisis and response: April 1994. A plane carrying the presidents of Rwanda and Burundi is shot down over Kigali. The assassination ignites events that lead to horrific genocide in Rwanda. Over 100 days, 800,000 people are killed....