Bringing the Peace Corps Home
One lesson Katie Long brought home from volunteering in Honduras for the Peace Corps in 2005-07 is that fun and games can have a positive social and health impact on underserved communities.
Long is now using recreation and fun to strengthen communities around Patterson Park in Baltimore as part of her public service placement as a graduate student in the Peaceworker Program at UMBC’s Shriver Center. The Peaceworker Program is designed to find ways for returning Peace Corps volunteers to serve their local communities when their missions abroad are completed.
As the recreation and Latino outreach coordinator for the nonprofit Friends of Patterson Park, Long works with Baltimore City Parks and Recreation and local groups to use sports, health and recreation programs to build community around Patterson Park. Programs range from nutrition classes and physical fitness boot camps to volleyball, soccer and a tennis program designed for urban children who don’t normally have access to the sport.
“The Friends of Patterson Park tries to use the sports and fun activities you do at a park as a way to contribute to the community and to promote health and physical fitness and outreach to the growing Latino community,” said Long, who will earn a master’s degree in intercultural communication (INCC) and certification in ESOL at UMBC this spring.
This year’s National Peace Corps Week — celebrated the first week of March — celebrates the “third goal” of the Peace Corps as envisioned by its founder, Sargent Shriver: “that someday we are going to bring it home to America.”
The Shriver Center’s Peaceworker Program has been pursuing the “third goal” since it was created in 1994 by Shriver, a native of Maryland. Over 120 returned Peace Corps volunteers have earned graduate degrees as Peaceworker fellows by combining their studies with public service positions focused on addressing urban issues in the Baltimore region.
Ten of the 14 current Peaceworker fellows are enrolled in graduate programs at UMBC.
Peaceworker fellow Amy Panoni, who will earn her master’s in public policy at UMBC this May, is working as a special projects coordinator for My Sister’s Place, a Catholic Charities of Baltimore facility for homeless women and their children.
Panoni created the agency’s job readiness curriculum and as part of her master’s degree oversees and evaluates other programs, such as life skills workshops and a rental assistance program called “Homeward Bound” that provides homeless families with housing and support services.
UMBC INCC student Duncan Cohen, who returned from the Peace Corps in Guinea, West Africa, in 2009, is doing conflict resolution work with the Community Conferencing Center in Baltimore. Cohen is a second generation Peace Corps volunteer and his grandfather was a colleague of Shriver’s when the Corps was founded in 1961.
Graduates of the Peaceworker program also continue to have an impact on the Baltimore-Washington region. Nearly 80 percent of all fellows came from outside the Baltimore region, but 60 percent have settled and remain engaged in service careers in local communities.
“With 100 percent of Peaceworker alumni continuing in service careers and more than half staying in our region engaged in community service careers, the Shriver Peaceworker Program is proving to be a creative class infusion for the City,” said Peaceworker director Joby Taylor.
View an episode of DigitalStories@UMBC featuring Katie Long’s Peace Corps service in Honduras: www.umbc.edu/oit/newmedia/studio/digitalstories/projects.php?movie=SC_Katie.flv
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