On 1 March 1961, President John F. Kennedy officially created the Peace Corps when he signed a special executive order. He felt it was a way to counter anti-American sentiment around the world. His brother-in-law, Sargent Shriver, became the organization’s first director. The first Peace Corps volunteers trained at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. That first group left for their first mission in Ghana and Tanzania on 28 August 1961.
Long before Kennedy was president, he endorsed the idea of sending volunteers to other countries to give technical assistance and promote peace. As a congressman in 1951, he supported a plan to send college graduates to the Middle East to give “technical advice and assistance to the underprivileged.”
In 1952, Senator Brien McMahon from Connecticut proposed the creation of an “army” of young Americans to serve as “missionaries of democracy.”
Nine years later, Kennedy revisited the concept while campaigning for president on 14 October 1960. After a hard day on the campaign trail, Kennedy stopped at the University of Michigan campus to sleep. However, when he arrived he discovered that approximately 10,000 students had assembled to hear the presidential candidate speak. In that 2am speech, Kennedy asked how many of the students would be willing to “serve their country and the cause of peace by living and working in the developing world.” With that simple question, the Peace Corps was born.
Congress later passed the Peace Corps Act in September 1961, authorising the programme that sent men and women “qualified for service abroad and willing to serve” in order to help developing countries meet “their needs for trained manpower.”
Today, the Peace Corps operates in over 60 countries, with volunteers working in various sectors, including education, health, and community development.
Source: Mystic Stamps
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