Can you imagine anything more antithetical to the monumental jingoism of Donald Trump than the mission and spirit of the nation’s Peace Corps?
Neither can I.
Many of us these days are hunkering down, avoiding most Trump and Elon Musk news and quietly grieving our nation’s direction. So, when I learned that a local group of Peace Corps alums is working to actively push back, I took notice.
Some background: The city of Madison, specifically the University of Wisconsin, is a long-established hotbed for Peace Corps recruitment. The campus produced more volunteers than any other American university in 2023, and Dane County has a huge concentration of returned Peace Corps volunteers, second only to Washington, D.C. among U.S. cities. Since the Peace Corps was founded 64 years ago, UW-Madison has produced 2,766 volunteers, second-most nationally.
The name of the local group is RPCV Madison (Returned Peace Corps Volunteers). Since 1982, it has raised more than $1.5 million for local programs and international development projects. It is stepping up its efforts just as Trump is blocking humanitarian aid abroad through the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and targeting immigrants for removal through executive orders.
The Peace Corps, linked historically to the presidency of John F. Kennedy, celebrates its 65th anniversary next year. As an independent agency, the Peace Corps trains and deploys volunteers to communities in partner countries throughout the world.
JFK created the Peace Corps via an executive order in March 1961, shortly after he implored citizens in his inaugural speech to “ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.”
(Trump, then 14 years old, likely regarded that advice as being for suckers and losers, just as that is how he reportedly thinks about members of the U.S. military who died in the line of duty.)
The vice president of the local returnee group is Justin Kohl, an infectious disease expert at SSM Health who volunteered in Guatemala from 2007 to 2009, working to improve rural health conditions.
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