June 7, 2011 – Peace Corps Worldwide

Thor Hanson new book about Feathers!

Jun 07 2011

Thor Hanson (Uganda 1993–95) who wrote the wonderful The Impenetrable Forest a few years ago, his Peace Corps memoir of Uganda, has a new book, Feathers: The Evolution of a Natural Miracle, published by Basic Books this month. In a review in this weekend edition of The Wall Street Journal, Jonathan Rosen, the editorial director of NextbooksInc. writes “Mr. Hanson may be a scientist but he writes like a man who believes in the value of a story.” Rosen goes onto say a lot of wonderful things about Feathers, including, “. . . Mr. Hanson knows it isn’t just the bird at the far end of the binoculars but the human being at the near end that matters, and he is writing as much about the human urge to understand, appreciate and appropriate the wild world as he writing about feathers, which he calls, in his subtitle, a ‘natural miracle.’”

USAID End Runs the Peace Corps

Jun 07 2011

JUNE 07, 2011 by RICK COHEN When critics suggest that the Obama administration is hard on the corporate sector, they may be missing specific elements of the Obama agenda that have lots of corporate sector promotions built into government programs. Take the volunteerism program of the U.S. Agency for International Development. USAID just established the Center of Excellence for International Corporate Volunteerism, developed in conjunction with IBM and the nonprofit CDC Development Solutions, an organization that manages international corporate volunteerism programs. CDS does well in this deal, getting $743,076 from USAID over two years to get the Center’s website up and operational and IBM will kick in $4.1 million in addition to in-kind donations of technology plus 100 volunteer employees. According to CDS 21 major corporations are on tap to send 2,000 employee volunteers overseas this year compared to only six companies that sent 280 employees to volunteer overseas in . . .

Archive - June 7, 2011