In the spirit of the Peace Corps, which JFK launched with his first executive order as president without having the slightest idea of how it would turn out, the editors of Peace Corps at 50 launch this project with the same optimism and hope for success.

As you probably know, the Peace Corps turns 50 years old in 2011. What you may not have considered is what a remarkable milestone it is. In the last weeks of his campaign for president, Senator John F. Kennedy resisted floating the idea of a volunteer organization, but Hubert Humphrey kept telling him: “The polls are 50/50. This idea will tip the balance” (or words to that effect).

It must have seemed like a small risk to introduce the idea of a volunteer corps at two in the morning on the steps of the University of Michigan with 10,000 students in attendance. Kennedy never said the words Peace Corps (as he did a few weeks later in a formal address at the Cow Palace in San Francisco), but the notion was embedded in a few lines of his impromptu and very short speech:

How many of you who are going to be doctors are willing to spend your days in Ghana? Technicians or engineers, how many of you are willing to work in the Foreign Service and spend your lives traveling around the world? On your willingness to do that, not merely to serve one year or two years in the service, but on your willingness to contribute part of your life to this country, I think will depend the answer whether a free society can compete. I think it can! And I think Americans are willing to contribute. But the effort must be far greater than we have ever made in the past.

That was about the extent of the message, but the idea caught fire and blazed away for the last days of the campaign. Did that idea tip the election? Who knows? But President Kennedy made it a point to establish the Peace Corps by Executive Order 10924 on March 1, 1961. With a stroke of his pen (followed by a lot of scrambling by Sargent Shriver in Washington and Maury Albertson in Colorado), President Kennedy put in place the first equal opportunity adventure in U.S. government history.

It may come as a surprise that three of the volunteers in Pakistan 1 (1961) were African American and that the director of that program was a woman. As a point of historical reference, Martin Luther King made his “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963, and it took until 1964 for the Civil Rights Act to bar discrimination in employment on the basis of race and sex.

Over the years, Peace Corps as an organization has been bumped around by changes in administration and attitudes about what exactly volunteers should be doing. But like a simple cork, it never sinks. And at its heart, it doesn’t change much. Read the blogs beaming out of Kazakhstan; the stories they tell sound both fresh and familiar.

The intention of this project is not to trap the Peace Corps experience in a pretty piece of amber. Rather, it responds to an implicit question that President Kennedy might have liked: What might our combined stories offer as a guide in a world where people are closer, the globe is smaller, and the importance of understanding each other greater than ever?