The US needed a Peace Corps in the ’60s — it still needs one today 

We’re just three months into President Trump’s second term, and already the Peace Corps is on the chopping block. While he touts solutions of tariffs and “government efficiency,” he shatters our alliances and our hard-won moral authority abroad.  

By contrast, less than a month before winning his election in 1960, John F. Kennedy announced his vision for a “Peace Corps” at the University of Michigan. In the six and a half decades since, nearly 240,000 American volunteers have responded to Kennedy’s inspiring call, “Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.”  

The Peace Corps experience is now more relevant to the United States than ever.  

In 1984, the Peace Corps sent me to a place I could hardly find on a map. I was assigned to Sierra Leone to teach farmers how to improve their rice yields in swamps. I lived in a peaceful rainforest village with 40 rice-farming families in mud-brick homes on the edge of the country’s diamond fields. During my early days there, the farmers taught me how to gather the necessities for living: food, water, medicine and mail. I developed habits and routines that firmly anchored me in the community and found meaningful and enduring connections in a society that generously welcomed me.  

Until this immersive experience, I was naively oblivious to the bitter history that Sierra Leoneans themselves had shared their agricultural expertise with their enslavers, thus enabling them to cultivate rice in the swampy lowlands of the Carolinas and Georgia. 

The U.S., with its growing disparities in health, education and wealth, and a government that is discounting many of its citizens’ needs, increasingly resembles some of the countries where Peace Corps volunteers serve. Americans, like so many abroad, are struggling with broken systems and are unable to respond to dislocated workers, children’s educational needs and inadequate healthcare. Peace Corps volunteers have lived in places where injustices such as these, sustained by corruption and disenfranchisement, have exploded into brutal and prolonged civil conflict. Four years after my departure, this happened in Sierra Leone. We cannot let it happen in the United States. 

The Peace Corps is often portrayed as a rugged experience for privileged college graduates or as a community of change agents willing to endure hardships for a benevolent outcome. Yet, the enduring success of the Peace Corps consistently counters these stereotypes and offers a vision for America now. Volunteers have demonstrated that building and supporting collective agencies for good is the essential work of social cohesion in any nation. The Peace Corps expands this definition of volunteerism to create partnership-oriented cultural systems that foster mutual respect, one person and one community at a time, which bridges people and nations in a fraught and trembling world. 

Energized Americans are once again answering President John F. Kennedy’s call: What can I do for my country? With Democratic traditions and government supports formerly taken for granted and under siege today, we are all the Peace Corps now.  

According to the National Peace Corps Association, funding the Peace Corps costs each American a mere $1.26 annually — a bargain that extends hope and acknowledges our interdependence. By fostering a global culture of mutuality, we enhance the well-being of everyone. We create a safer and more harmonious world that addresses humanity’s shared concerns.  

We can ill afford to imperil this under-appreciated agency within the U.S. Department of State. 

Betsy Small is the former executive director of Creating Friendships for Peace and is the author of the new book, “Before Before: A Story of Discovery and Loss in Sierra Leone.” The author’s views do not reflect any past positions or titles, which are for identification purposes only.