Get over thinking that the Peace Corps will ever have an effective worldwide presence, either as a development or a cultural- exchange organization. And forget about hare-brained initiatives such as the current attempt to increase the Peace Corps's presence in majority-Muslim countries. One hundred or one thousand volunteers, no matter how helpful, friendly, courteous, kind or optimistic, are never going to make a significant impact on how the Muslim world views the United States. The Peace Corps needs to steal a page from the Millennium Challenge Corporation playbook and get serious about working with serious partners on behalf of well-defined and reasonable goals. Set some criteria for what a country needs to have happening on the ground before it is deemed eligible for a Peace Corps program-simple things like minimal respect for the rule of law, press freedom and a real commitment to economic development. Revisit this list every five years, with a clear possibility of the Peace Corps directing its limited budget elsewhere if the country isn't serious. We need to stop wasting money racing in and out of countries like Haiti and Chad, places that have never been stable enough to take development seriously and are unlikely to do so any time soon.
Robert L. Strauss writes: Eight Fixes for the Peace Corps
Nation-Building in America
[Excerpt]
Eight Fixes
One cannot fault the Peace Corps for any lack of idealism, or naivety. Years after its founding, it continues to send under-qualified people to work-without adequate support or supervision-for cynical, corrupt, self-serving regimes while still believing that this is all for the greater good. This organizational delusion is a shame because the Peace Corps could actually be a model for doing good overseas. It just needs to drop the idea that its good intentions excuse ineffectiveness and put a dozen or two sensible policies into force. In addition to what I have already mentioned, the following eight fixes would go a long way to resuscitating the original Peace Corps mission.
First, get over thinking that the Peace Corps will ever have an effective worldwide presence, either as a development or a cultural- exchange organization. And forget about hare-brained initiatives such as the current attempt to increase the Peace Corps's presence in majority-Muslim countries. One hundred or one thousand volunteers, no matter how helpful, friendly, courteous, kind or optimistic, are never going to make a significant impact on how the Muslim world views the United States. The Peace Corps needs to steal a page from the Millennium Challenge Corporation playbook and get serious about working with serious partners on behalf of well-defined and reasonable goals. Set some criteria for what a country needs to have happening on the ground before it is deemed eligible for a Peace Corps program-simple things like minimal respect for the rule of law, press freedom and a real commitment to economic development. Revisit this list every five years, with a clear possibility of the Peace Corps directing its limited budget elsewhere if the country isn't serious. We need to stop wasting money racing in and out of countries like Haiti and Chad, places that have never been stable enough to take development seriously and are unlikely to do so any time soon.
Second, assign more volunteers to outstanding people-to-people organizations and fewer to government agencies that, even in the best of circumstances, rarely work better than the post office (on a good day). In other words, place volunteers with organizations in countries disposed to success rather than solo in places likely to guarantee 24 months of headbanging frustration.
Third, stop moaning about how much money everybody else gets (like those military bands), and start doing something substantive with what the Peace Corps does get. Presidents Clinton, Bush and Obama all pledged more support for the Peace Corps, and it never happened. Given current economic constraints, this is unlikely to change (despite an impressive recent grassroots campaign launched by the National Peace Corps Association). Accept the fact that presidential candidates (and Presidents, too) pull the Peace Corps off the shelf when they need a little feel-good publicity or an applause line, and then promptly shelve it for another four years.
Fourth, set some objective criteria for what it takes to get into the Peace Corps as a volunteer. For younger people without a track record, how about a demonstrated commitment to volunteerism, such as one or two years in AmeriCorps or CityYear? And forget the unwritten fourth goal of the Peace Corps being a place for young Americans to "expand their horizons." Host countries aren't interested in Americans who are searching for life's meaning; they're looking for people who can get stuff done. Americans who are lost, whether young or old, don't often "find themselves" in developing countries. More typically, they find that they really like flush toilets and being able to keep up with who's doing what to whom on the latest episode of Lost.
Fifth, make development the priority. If the Peace Corps really started helping people to Winter (January/February) 2010 73 How to Fix the Peace Corps improve their standards of living, mutual understanding and goodwill among humankind and nations would follow. Right now, believe it or not, the Peace Corps says its number one priority is the safety and security of volunteers. Of course, this is a concern for every organization, but that doesn't mean it should be a strategic goal. How did this happen? Several years ago, a volunteer in Latin America, someone who was probably under-supervised in the first place, went missing and has never been found. At about the same time, President Bush appointed a former police officer as Peace Corps director. Subsequently the agency concentrated a huge amount of time and money on developing a safety and security group that has had no demonstrable effect on making volunteers safer or more secure. Why? Because the Peace Corps continues to send the wrong people to the wrong countries to do jobs that are ill-defined and under-supported.
Sixth, put enough staff in the field to supervise and support volunteers. At the Peace Corps, for every ten volunteers out on the front lines there is maybe one person backing them up in the rear. In the military, the ratio is reversed. The Peace Corps's formula is beyond penny-wise, pound-foolish. Volunteers can be AWOL for weeks and no one in the office knows about it. Cell phones and emails only abet the absentee volunteer, because they can be anywhere and pretend to be at work. Nothing can replace face-to-face contact when it comes to supervision.
Seventh, accept that the world has been going urban for centuries and that more and more of the world's needy are living in urban squats, not in straw and mud shacks out in the bush. When, for safety and security reasons, the Peace Corps doesn't send volunteers into urban environments, it is neglecting a huge portion of its target population, rendering it more irrelevant in the fight against poverty and deprivation than it already is.
Finally, start matching applicants to specific jobs. The Peace Corps says that this is too difficult, so it continues to match applicants and jobs only in a general kind of way, like telling people they are under consideration for an "environmental education program in Frenchspeaking Africa." Few trainees are told where they will be assigned until many weeks after their arrival overseas. No wonder so many volunteers wind up ill-suited for the jobs they are given, and that so many give up in frustration and leave their assignments early. At the Peace Corps headquarters at the corner of 20th and L Streets in downtown Washington, DC, plans are already well underway to celebrate the agency's fiftieth anniversary in March 2011. At that time, we can expect to hear all kinds of anecdotal testimony about how the Peace Corps transformed lives that were otherwise headed down the road to nowhere in neglected and forlorn locations around the world. These stories will be moving and heartfelt. We can even expect to hear several current and former heads of state testify that, without the early intervention in their lives of an energetic Peace Corps volunteer, their professional trajectory might have taken a very different path.
Unfortunately, the sentimental, "we are the world" ethos likely to prevail at these events will testify to the exceptions rather than to the rule of the Peace Corps's effectiveness. The Peace Corps has lasted as long as it has because it is based on hope and faith-hope that someday, somehow, the policies, tactics and strategies that have failed it for so long will start working. I suppose this makes the Peace Corps one of the original faith-based organizations. What the Peace Corps needs to do now is accept that its first five decades were a noble but largely failed experiment in good intentions. It needs to imagine what a "peace corps" being created for the first time today would look like, and re-invent itself in that image. The Peace Corps should never give up on hope. But it does need to learn to distinguish hope and dreams from facts and results, and it needs above all to turn the power of hope on itself.
