Then the board chair for the National Peace Corps Association, Werner stopped by Shriver’s office to have him sign some fundraising letters, a task he thought would take only 15 minutes. Steve Werner, a member of the Rotary Club of Denver Southeast and a Peace Corps volunteer in Korea from 1976 to 1978, recalls a meeting in the early 1990s with JFK’s brother-in-law Sargent Shriver, who had served as the first director of the Peace Corps. “It’s about being active in your community and how you can best take the things you’ve done in the Peace Corps and apply them when you come back.” “The third goal is not necessarily just about telling stories about your Peace Corps experience,” Hunt says. Service, therefore, is meant to continue once volunteers return home. The Peace Corps has three goals: providing training for men and women in interested host countries helping people in those countries to better understand Americans and helping Americans to better understand other peoples. And the Peace Corps’ chief areas of focus - agriculture, community economic development, education, environment, health, and youth in development - have much in common with Rotary’s. The mission of the Peace Corps - “to promote world peace and friendship” - is one Rotary has embraced for more than 100 years. The relationship between Rotary International and the Peace Corps, made official with a 2014 partnership agreement, has its foundation in the organizations’ shared values. “A Rotarian took her to task,” Hunt says. Hunt recalls attending a Rotary club meeting while traveling to another part of the United States and hearing an opinionated academic speaking about Iran. “They pop up in Rotary more than you might think,” says Charlie Hunt, a member of the Rotary Club of Denver Lodo, who served in Vanuatu from 2006 to 2008. Chances are there might be a returned Peace Corps volunteer (known as an RPCV) in your club or district. In the 60 years since its creation, more than 240,000 Americans have served in the Peace Corps. “‘Ask not what your country can do for you - ask what you can do for your country’ was very real for me,” says Ted Bendelow, a member of the Rotary Club of Mead, Colorado, who joined the Peace Corps six months after Kennedy’s assassination and served in Liberia from 1964 to 1966. In March 1961, President Kennedy signed an executive order creating the Peace Corps. The idea took hold, and hundreds of students signed petitions pledging to volunteer. Speaking from the steps of the student union at the University of Michigan, he challenged students, who had been waiting until well after midnight for his arrival, to contribute part of their life to service. Kennedy, just weeks before the 1960 presidential election, that catapulted the idea of a volunteer corps of Americans into public consciousness. Rotary and the Peace Corps seemed meant for one another - as subsequent developments would demonstrate. “The volunteers loved it because Rotary clubs immediately gave them a good connection to their community and a natural circle of friends.” “The clubs loved it because they got volunteers who were really knowledgeable in the area of community development and who had a lot of ideas, energy, time, and skills,” Mann says. By the end of 2019, Peace Corps Northern Macedonia had placed four Peace Corps volunteers with Rotary clubs in the country. Mann’s supervisor at the Peace Corps took notice. When two Peace Corps volunteers in Štip who were teaching English needed more books, Mann talked to the club about finding a local distributor and also reached out to his friends at the Rotary Club of La Jolla, California, where he’d been a member previously, to connect them with the Štip club so that they could work together on the project. Mann connected the club with a youth group and worked on small projects such as litter cleanups. I figured that’s a pretty good opportunity. “I had just linked up with a club of people with big networks in the community, and most spoke English,” Mann says. Mann’s primary assignment with the Peace Corps was to work with a legal clinic for Roma residents, but volunteers are encouraged to take on a side project. And they were happy to have someone who knew what Rotary was.” “I was thrilled to have met someone involved in Rotary so I could tap into my experience there. “They didn’t really know what Rotary was, but someone had told them it was a good thing to do.” This was great news to Mann, who had been a Rotary member since 2004 (and who currently belongs to the Rotary E-Club of Silicon Valley). “He told me they had just started the club a few months before,” Mann says. Rotary Club of Štip members review Rotary-donated English-language children’s storybooks with representatives from the Goce Delčev-Štip primary school. News & Features (down arrow opens sub-menu)> Our Programs (down arrow opens sub-menu)> Get Involved (down arrow opens sub-menu)> Search SubmitĪbout Rotary (down arrow opens sub-menu)>
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