Our goal is to collect and publish stories—in print and online—that capture the resilient spirit of the Peace Corps. This site is our invitation to you— RPCVs, directors, staff, teachers and host country coworkers —to write up your memories and send them along.

Publishing these stories also fulfills—in part—the Third Goal of the Peace Corps that JFK set out at its creation: to help Americans understand other peoples of the world just a little better. We wonder if President Kennedy and first Peace Corps director Sargent Shriver somehow knew in 1961 that meeting the goal of understanding would have become so urgent in 2011.

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.

John F. Kennedy, words delivered in 1960 at two in the morning on the steps of the University of Michigan with 10,000 students in attendance.