Tag Archives: Peace Corps

11.13.08
by

Teach For India, Teach For All – Wendy Kopp’s Vision Gone Global

Modeled after the success of Teach For America, Teach For India aims to stamp out inequities in India’s schools by recruiting top college grads to teach in its poorest schools for two years.

Initiated in 2007, about 100 TFI Fellows will serve starting next fall in Mumbai and Pune and conduct classes in English. TFI Fellows will earn a competitive starting teachers salary, and receive compensation for housing banner_apply and transportation.

Struggling students will have access to some of the country’s brightest young leaders. While TFI Fellows will be trained and challenged. They will carry with them the experiences in the classroom far into their careers, whatever path they take.

As in the United States, India’s educational system has some stark statistics:

  • According to India’s 2001 Census, only 61% of the country’s population is literate. For women, the literacy rate is even lower than the national average, at 48%.
  • There are currently 7,500,000 children out of school in India.
  • Out of every 100 children in India, 15 will never attend school. Of those who attend school, 50% will drop out before Class V.

Reading through the web site of Teach For India (TFI) reminds me of reading the Teach For America (TFA) web site — similar vision, similar model, similar theory of change. To solve the problems of under-qualified teachers and outdated teaching methodology, India looked to Teach For America as a successful model. But India wasn’t the only country asking TFA for advice; apparently many other countries were. From the TFI web site:

In 2007, a new organization called Teach For All was created to support entrepreneurs in other countries who were pursuing the development of the Teach For America model locally. Teach For All was launched at the Clinton Global Initiative in September of 2007. Although a significant resource for Teach For India, Teach For All is a separately incorporated, funded, and staffed organization that is being incubated within Teach For America.

A “global network of independent social enterprises,” Teach For All-affiliated programs are operating or developing in ten nations, including the Latvia, Australia, Germany, and the United Kingdom.

map_4Note that like TFA, these other programs seem to be recruiting their own best and brightest (i.e. they are not overseas service opportunities for U.S. citizens—see Peace Corps, Jesuit Volunteers International, VSO Canada, and Atlas Service Corps —just a sampling of opportunities if you are from the United States and are eager to serve abroad).

11.13.08
by

GOOD Sheet on National Service

Have you seen this new series of sheets GOOD magazine has beengoodsheet_010_natlservice_em2 producing this year? They are folded up sheets of newsprint dedicated to a single topic. One I saw before the election was dedicated to close races — the kind where every vote counts.

This week’s is on service:

President Kennedy famously declared during his inauguration speech that we should ask ourselves what we can do for our country. National service takes many forms—from Americans deployed overseas to senior citizens teaching a new generation how to read. Now that the election is over, let’s continue the spirit of civic engagement. Find out what you can do for your country.

GOOD Magazine is a smart magazine (they assume you are smart, too — what a relief) that donates your magazine subscription fee to a nonprofit. Browse other GOOD Sheets.

11.11.08
by

Veterans Day

To my grandfather, retired Col. Herman F. Allen, ex-POW, and to all Vets — thank you!

Herman Allen, 92 this year, has been a servant leader all his life. When I joined Peace Corps in 1998, he told images-1me how proud he was of me for serving my country. That meant so much to me, coming from a colonel, a former prisoner of war, and my granddad. The title of this blog comes from his comment, from the notion that enlisting in “the Service” can include a broader scope of service opportunities than just military.

But on Veterans Day, it’s all about military service, and the brave people who have put their lives on the line to keep us safe and free.

Read more about Veterans Day.

11.11.08
by

Tips for Service Corps Parents

Parents tend to vary in their feelings when their child takes part in a term of service—from excited and supportive to suspicious and concerned. Wherever you fit on the spectrum, here are some words of wisdom to keep in mind during and after your child’s term.

You may feel that by volunteering full-time for a year, your child is floundering. The truth is, if you have raised a thoughtful child who is passionate about making the world a better place, they are going to need some time to figure out how and where to do that. Unlike so many career paths, the path to social change is relatively undefined.

For starters, a term of service experience offers many benefits to the community and to your child—for more on this, read Why Service? If your kid is thinking of signing up for a second term, read Why Service? a second time.

What your child needs from you:

Protect them from the Peer Pressure You May Feel

  • When your peers brag about the material achievements of their kids, don’t panic. Surely you can find other things to brag about—namely, what your child has single-handedly achieved to end poverty, educate youth, build community bridges, etc. Hopefully your child is keeping track, so you can ask them for the details. If you really want to show your kid you support them, brag about them in their presence. Let them blush and protest, but let them hear you.
  • Learn to explain their program in a sentence or two. It may help to say, “It’s similar to Peace Corps but…” because most people have heard of it, have some general understanding that Peace Corps is a legitimate volunteer organization, and that the people who participate are not to be mocked.


After the term ends, be patient and helpful about their career transition

  • First, recognize that when your kid’s term ends, they may be processing what they experienced and what they saw—they may need time to decompress emotionally. You can play an important role by listening to them and reflecting back what they say, non-judgmentally—no use getting in an argument about public policy at this point. They just want to be heard.
  • The first thing you may want to know is when they will get a “real” job. When speaking of their career transition, it’s so important to stay positive and helpful, and keep your own anxiety out of that discussion.
  • That all said, set clear boundaries if you have limits around what kind of financial support you are willing to offer them moving forward. If you are firm, you will be more patient with the choices they make because you know (and they know) that they will not be living off your income longer than you’d like.
  • If your child’s moving back in with you, establish clear rent payment expectations and also the time-frame for when they need to be out on their own again.

The best thing you can do, for yourself, is get educated about your kid’s program and about service in general. Talk to parents of other former corps members and find out how the term affected their lives and careers. Find out what financial and educational benefits your child’s program offers. If your kid has a work plan or position description, it may help to look at it, to realize the responsibilities they have been tackling.

Just like when they learned to tie a shoe or ride a bike, your child must now practice new life and career-transition skills. And just like then, they need you to be there to support them, cheer them on, and get so excited for them when they succeed.

Since my mom is reading this, I will add, thanks, Mom, for always being my cheerleader. I think I mostly turned out all right.

11.07.08
by

Tolerance and Service

Today the New York Times reports findings that “Mutual trust between members of different races can catch on just as quickly, and spread just as fast, as suspicion.” The study has a few implications for service corps.

Working together with a person of another race increases your ease around others of that race. In the article “Tolerance Over Race Can Spread, Study Finds,” author Benedict Carey describes a study that shows that

In some new studies, psychologists have been able to establish a close relationship between diverse pairs — black and white, Latino and Asian, black and Latino — in a matter of hours.

The study involves pairs of people from different races in a variety of activities for four hours.

First they answer a series of questions, designed to get to the bottom of some big issues quickly (like “If you could change anything about the way you were raised, what would it be?”). Next they play on the same team, competing against another pair in “timed parlor games.” In the third section, they talk about issues like what it means to be a part of their ethnic or racial group. And finally they work together in a classic trust exercise, where one person, blindfolded, is led through a maze by the other person.

By the end of their time together, the pair’s relationship “is as close as any relationship the person has,” according to the social psychologist who developed the exercises, Art Aron.

That relationship immediately reduces conscious and unconscious bias in both people, and also significantly reduces prejudice toward the other group in each individual’s close friends.

This extended-contact effect, as it is called, travels like a benign virus through an entire peer group, counteracting subtle or not so subtle mistrust.

Similar increases in tolerance are seen when people of mixed races are working or talking together in a room — others in the room ease up around members of the race group that is different from them.

One reason for the swift increases in tolerance is that we are all motivated to be part of the in-group, whether the in-group includes people of our own race or not.

The study has immediate and diverse implications for service corps.

For service corps programs engaging participants of different races, the activities outlined in the tolerance study may serve as a blue-print for team-building and cross-cultural engagement, where no one person is singled out as “different” but where everyone’s differences are expressed and put to work. The importance of building trust and confidence across race is crucial, for getting things done, as well as for team building.

Further, the study may explain why people who engage in international service have a tendency to come home with a bit of an identity crisis (e.g., I still feel Chinese on the inside though I am not Chinese ethnically) — and why they often express tolerance for racial and cultural differences once they have returned home. Other members of service corps who serve constituents across race or in mixed-race communities tend to experience similar growth in perspective.

Many service corps value diversity and offer opportunities for corps members to dialogue about race and culture.

One resource that groups turn to is books, like that of Eboo Patel, founder and Executive Director of Interfaith Youth Corps. He writes about tolerance and intolerance in his book Acts of Faith: The Story of an American Muslim and the Struggle for the Soul of a Generation.

When I attended a professional development conference called Northwest Leader Corps in 2004-05, we watched and talked about the film The Color of Fear, a very powerful, honest documentary about the role of race in the lives of nine men.

Relationship-building exercises described above would take such a workshop to the next level — it’d be not just educational but also transformational.

Watch the Color of Fear trailer:

Also check out this Lesson Plans blog post by Christina Shunnarah, a teacher in a cross-cultural learning environment.

The tolerance study sounds like great news to me, and I look forward to more good news on race relations to come out over the next several years now that people are paying attention to race in a different way than ever before.