Connecting people with a Peace Corps connection!

    * you're a returned Peace Corps volunteer (RPCV)
    * you're currently serving in the Peace Corps
    * you've applied to be a Peace Corps volunteer
    * a friend or family member has served in Peace Corps
    * you've worked for Peace Corps

or

    * you just think it's one of the best ideas our country ever came up with!

The National Peace Corps Association is a 501 (c) (3) non-profit organization connecting, informing and engaging returned Peace Corps volunteers (RPCVs), former Peace Corps staff and friends of Peace Corps committed to fostering peace through service, education and advocacy. The NPCA network also includes over 135 affiliate groups across the U.S.

For more information visit http://www.PeaceCorpsConnect.org

To purchase Peace Corps-themed merchandise visit http://www.cafepress.com/pcorpsconnect. Your purchase helps support the service, education and advocacy activities of the Peace Corps community!

Check out the podcasts by returned Peace Corps volunteers making a difference at http://www.socialedge.org/features/peace-corps-entrepreneurs

Read our blog, PeaceCorpsPolyglot, at http://peacecorpsconnect.typepad.com/peacecorpspolyglot/

Visit our website at www.peacecorpsconnect.org.  A detailed overview of our activities in 2006 can be read in our 2006 Annual Report.

From the Ground Up: The Returned Peace Corps Community

At conferences of global educators in the Midwest in the mid-1970s, a handful of returned Peace Corps volunteers (RPCVs) discovered one another and began meeting regularly to discuss how to promote at home the values and lessons they had learned as Peace Corps volunteers in the developing world. They adopted as their mission one of the three goals articulated by President John F. Kennedy when he created the Peace Corps in 1961: come home and teach your neighbors about the communities you discovered in Africa, Latin America, Asia, and the Middle East. They gave the growing numbers of returning Peace Corps volunteers in America a continuing mission and a communal identity as Returned Peace Corps Volunteers.

In 1979, these global educators joined with leaders of communities of RPCVs in New York and Washington, D.C. to create the National Council of Returned Peace Corps Volunteers (incorporated 1981). In 1993, we changed our name to the more inclusive National Peace Corps Association.

RPCVs and their values of community service constitute a powerful force in America. Those who learned about the developing world by living and working in the mountains, deserts, floodplains, and small villages around the world have in subsequent careers brought a new and enlightened perspective to U.S. diplomacy and to international development policies and practices, to the management of some of the nation's largest corporations doing business overseas, to the leadership of citizen engagement in labor, trade, and environmental debate, and to the lessons learned in schools and communities across the United States. RPCVs have succeeded at the highest levels as journalists, film directors, and as authors of a growing body of literature – fiction and non-fiction – much of it on life in the developing world.

The strength of the NPCA lies in the commitment of its members and affiliated groups. Many of the groups formed to target the needs of the countries in which they served, providing teacher training, medical and food supplies in crisis, and mediating settlements to political conflict in the countries where they served as volunteers.

Since 1983, we have recognized outstanding individual humanitarian service by RPCVs with a national award named after Sargent Shriver, the founding director of the Peace Corps and a strong supporter of the RPCV movement. Beginning in 1988, we have honored an affiliated group which demonstrates exemplary community service at home or abroad. That award is named for the late Loret Miller Ruppe, the agency's longest-serving director and an advocate of service to the global community.