Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, October 28) — The United States Peace Corps has announced it will resume deploying volunteers to the Philippines by the start of 2023.
Volunteers of the humanitarian group were pulled out from the country two years ago, along with those posted in other parts of the world, due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We are incredibly excited to have them back” US Peace Corps Chief Executive Officer Carol Spahn told reporters on Thursday.
“And we are incredibly excited to be reimagining how we serve together in support of the national priorities of the Philippine government,” she added.
Peace Corps volunteers, which are deployed in about 60 countries, were recalled from their assignments at the onset of the pandemic in March 2020.
An initial group of 60 volunteers will return to the Philippines in January next year.
It will double by September, Spahn said, making it “one of the largest the Peace Corps has organized since resuming its operations” last year.
Spahn, who is visiting the country for the first time, also travelled to Cebu to meet with local partner organizations, including Glory Reborn, which primarily advocates maternity health care.
“We have spent the last two years really thinking deeply about how we can engage our volunteers in service overseas– safely for them and for the communities in which they’ll be serving,” Spahn explained.
He added that “extensive measures” have been put in place, including ensuring that their volunteers will comply with local mandates.
Aside from testing, volunteers will still be asked to mask up “to make sure they are OK and that they are not transmitting COVID.”
Established in 1961, the Peace Corps was a brainchild of former U.S. President John F. Kennedy to promote the vision of world peace and friendship, while countering anti-American sentiment.
It has since deployed more than 9,300 volunteers in different parts of the Philippines “in support of cultural exchange and grassroot development”.
The new batch of volunteers, to be sent out in communities in Luzon and the Visayas, will be working on a line-up of programs focusing on education and youth development. These programs were formulated in coordination with the Philippine National Volunteer Service Coordinating Agency (PNVSCA), which is attached under the National Economic Development Authority (NEDA).
“(US Peace Corps) is among the international volunteer service organizations with clear programming and they have specific target indicators per sector which they try to align with the national volunteer deployment framework,” PNVSCA Executive Director Donald James Gawe said.
Some of the projects to which the new volunteers will be assigned, Gawe said, will include initiatives that address climate change such as the coastal resource management project in seaside communities of Pangasinan to Ilocos Norte.
The group said it hopes to achieve its objectives by “building a corridor of volunteers in the Lingayen Gulf.”
“This can be through education and teaching of students as we’re working with youth and really enabling them to support their own communities,” Spahn said, citing climate change as a pressing global concern.
