Naomi Rennard
The international health field values volunteerism and international service is often a global health professional’s first field experience. At BU’s orientation, Department Chair Jon Simon charged the International Health concentrators to think about serving with Peace Corps (PC). Peace Corps Volunteers (PCVs) have the opportunity to immerse themselves in a new culture and work in the development field for two years. PCVs have the potential to impact the communities in which they serve as well as gain an important new worldview.
The opportunity to work in the developing world attracts many young adults to PC. At the start of this paper, I hoped to learn the impacts of PCV’s work on their host communities. After some initial research, however, this goal became secondary to understanding the positive attributes of PC and what changes could be made to the program to generate measurable and potentially lasting impacts within host communities. Currently PC does not have a set regimen for evaluating volunteers, but I believe assessments could not only help PC fulfill its mission more effectively, but also provide volunteers with enhanced field experiences.
According to PCVs, PC is a unique and valuable opportunity to challenge oneself and understand development work (1). Over 200,000 volunteers have served abroad since PC first began in 1960, and its reputation attracts a variety of people seeking to enhance their understanding of the developing world (2). While PCVs often indicate their experience was valuable for them and their careers, many volunteers do not know their impact on host communities.
Methods: What do we know now?
Though most returned PCVs (RPCVs) willingly give first hand accounts of their experiences abroad, published literature regarding PCVs’ successes, struggles, and failures is limited. Despite the fact that evaluations have been shown to enhance public health programs and their impacts, standardized frameworks for evaluation of international volunteer programs have not been established (3). Literature has begun to create such frameworks, and these documents are useful for evaluating PCV’s experiences, but no framework has been universally accepted as an evaluation tool (4), (5), (6). For this paper, I conducted a literature review of databases such as Google Scholar and PubMed to find available literature on international volunteerism. To add perspective to available literature, I conducted a series of personal interviews with RPCVs.
Literature Review
The available literature is one of two types. The first addresses the impact international volunteerism has on the careers of volunteers. Some articles assess health and medical professionals and their past volunteer experiences (7), (8), (9). Other assessments discuss instilling a desire for volunteerism among youth in order to sustain volunteering and development-focused work throughout adult life (4). These assessments are important for understanding volunteers and their potential, but not as valuable in assessing the successes of volunteers’ fieldwork. The second type of literature, which may be more useful in evaluating international volunteer programming, focuses on program attributes and individual characteristics that can affect civil service experiences (4), (5), (6). In one article, “length of stay” is implicated as being one of the major determinants of volunteers’ fieldwork successes. The paper indicated the longer volunteers serve, the more likely they are to generate sustainable development in a host community. One study of volunteers from New Zealand discussed impetus to serve, impacts their service experience had on their personality and career, and what volunteers thought were their fieldwork successes (6). Similar to early reports of PCVs, participants in the study indicated they had to be “open [minded] and flexible” and willing to try new things (6,10).
Much of the available literature, whether about volunteers themselves or the programs in which they participated, disclosed that the dearth of evaluative research in the field led the authors to create new models for assessment. This indicates a need for standardized evaluations for volunteers, especially in established programs like PC.
Personal Interviews
I initially hoped personal interviews with RPCVs would illustrate the impacts their PC experience had not only on their careers but also on their host communities. Instead, however, I gained several views of PC and different perspectives regarding some of the limitations of volunteers’ fieldwork (Table 1).
