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,...
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...
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...
Podcast: The Sound of Soft Power
The clearest through line to understanding soft power in geopolitics may not run through policy at all, but through ecology. For decades, scientists believed trees competed for resources in silence. What they later discovered was something closer to a conversation of roots sharing nutrients, warning signals, and information through vast underground networks—an exchange so constant and essential that dependence, not isolation, proved essential for survival. Those unseen systems beneath the surface that allow life to endure are on the forefront of my mind as I log on to chat with Christopher Wurst, a former foreign service officer and the host...
Champions of the Golden Valley
Snow sprays as young men and women race down the slopes of the mountains surrounding Bamyan, Afghanistan. Without a ski lift in sight, and with many of them on handmade wooden skis, skiing takes on an elevated purpose in this community. Champions of the Golden Valley is a heart-warming new documentary produced by RPCV Baktash Ahadi that follows Alishah Farhang, a skier who, after failing to qualify for the Olympics as Afghanistan's first winter Olympian, returns home to start a ski club in his mountain village. In the days and weeks leading up to the club’s annual Ski Challenge, the documentary...