The National Peace Corps Association Works to Create an Emergency Response Network

Nov 14 2020

“The COVID-19 pandemic is an ongoing national crisis that requires a creative and focused response by local and national governments as well as by individual Americans.

There is an immediate need in communities across the country, particularly among minority and underserved populations to identify and trace the sources of COVID-19 infection.

The Peace Corps community can help meet this immediate need.

Contact tracing on this scale requires large numbers of trained personnel to be quickly deployed to priority-need communities, in coordination with state and local public health professionals.”

NPCA’s first Emergency Response Network project was with U.S. Department of Health and Human Services of Seattle and King County, Washington. Dr. Anthony Fauci commended these RPCVs as they began training as contract tracers for COVID-19, in his moving address.

The only contact I could find for RPCVs who might want to apply to be a member of the NPCA Emergency Response Network was Dan Baker, Director of Global Reentry, at (202) 934-1534 or dan@peacecorpsconnect.org.

This is an email from Dan in regard to the program:

“There are no current opportunities outside of Washington State. If residents of WA are interested, I welcome them to contact me, but our partner in Seattle does require an WA home address.”
Posted by: Dan Baker

This is not the first program to enlist RPCVs to “serve at home” and help with National emergencies. Crisis Corps was created by Peace Corps in 1996, at the urging of Peace Corps World Wide’s John Coyne. Here is his account of that important history:

I came up with the term “crisis corps’ and the whole idea back in the early 1990s. I wrote a memo to the then head of the NPCA; it got some attention, not much, and only from RPCVs.

In 1994-5, Patty Garamendi called me and asked me to work with her in DC with the Peace Corps. She was running the office of Volunteer Support.

I did go to work and gave her a similar memo. She gave it to Carol Bellamy, then the director. Carol wanted to do it, but couldn’t get ‘support’ from the old-timers in the building.

When Mark Gearan came into the office in 1995, he asked me out to lunch very early. It was actually before he started in the office. (I think he had heard about me from Wofford.)

I told him about a Crisis Corps and he jumped on the idea. Actually wrote the name down on a pad while we were having lunch.

The Crisis Corps was created.

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