Remaking America's Image

Peace Corps Starts Recruiting Minorities, but Faces Resistance

By KELLY K. SPORS
STAFF REPORTER OF THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

For years, the Peace Corps focused its recruiting on idealistic white college students who were eager to go on a goodwill mission after graduation and attracted by the promise of an overseas experience. About 86% of the group's roughly 7,000 volunteers are white.

A Peace Corps recruiting poster stresses diversity

Now, concerned that the corps doesn't truly represent the increasingly multiethnic face of America, the 41-year-old international volunteer organization is trying to recruit more minorities. But it isn't easy. Many new graduates face big college loans that need repayment, and being able to defer them by joining the corps doesn't make them go away. They also worry about the tiny cost-of-living stipends the Peace Corps offers, about deferred career plans and about what their parents will think.

"They may feel pressure to start working [and] pay off their college loans," says Wilfredo Sauri, the Peace Corps' diversity recruitment director. But equally important, he adds, new graduates "may feel pressure to be back with their community."

'You're Crazy'

Valencia James, who taught health education in Madagascar after graduating from historically black Morgan State University in Baltimore a few years ago, recalls that "A lot of people asked me: 'How much do you get paid?'" as a Peace Corps volunteer. "When I said, 'I volunteer,' they said, 'You're crazy.'" The Peace Corps gave Ms. James her first chance to travel, but as the first woman in her family to graduate from college, she adds, she was pestered about her decision by friends and family.

Similarly, Jody Brooks, who is setting up a training program for basketball coaches as part of a Peace Corps program in Jamaica, says there is a lot of pressure from the African-American community to plunge into a career after graduation. After getting his master's degree in sports medicine from Oregon State University, Mr. Brooks decided he wanted to extend his community service abroad but faced some resistance from friends. "A lot of times, they don't feel they have the luxury to go explore the world after school," he says.

To pitch itself to minorities, the Peace Corps is tailoring its message to emphasize benefits like foreign-language and skills training, a payment of about $6,000 at the end of a stint, international experience, full medical coverage and the seven weeks of vacation that volunteers can use for travel abroad. Volunteers also receive a no-fee passport and a monthly stipend of a few hundred dollars to pay for food, housing and local transportation. The stipend is adjusted to account for local living costs, so that volunteers in South Africa get about $250 a month, while those on the Caribbean island of Antigua get about $600 a month.

Recruiters also talk up long-term benefits like a leg up in landing a government job (about 25% of the staff in the federal government's international development program are former volunteers).

Since June, a diversity task force has focused on sculpting a message that will attract minority recruits and their families. "Recruiters need to talk about the professional opportunities beneficial to parents that have invested a lot of money in their children," says Gaddi Vasquez, the new director of the Peace Corps. And increasingly, recruiters are visiting schools with big black and Hispanic enrollments, placing ads-sometimes in foreign languages-in ethnic newspapers, and sending speakers to minority conferences.

'Baywatch' View

At a recent meeting at historically black Norfolk State University in Virginia, students pepper Peace Corps recruiter Nikki Maxwell with questions. They want to know how the Peace Corps works, what their odds of being accepted are (only about one-third of applicants win spots), whether they will be placed in primitive conditions-and particularly, what will two years in the corps do for them. "Has anybody gotten over there and decided they want to leave?" one female student inquires. It happens quite frequently, Ms. Maxwell replies, though the Peace Corps tries to weed out those applicants before they actually get overseas.

Among Ms. Maxwell's best prospects that day was 22-year-old Elliott Horton, a graduate of nearby historically black Hampton University who was thinking about joining the Peace Corps to learn about international business. But Mr. Horton concedes that "some of my friends kind of question why I would want to do this when I could just be starting my own business."

President Bush has called on the Peace Corps to double in size by 2007 to 14,000 volunteers. But the new campaign is not just about increasing the Peace Corps' numbers, Mr. Vasquez says. It's also about representing America as a multiethnic country.

As she launches into her pitch, Ms. Maxwell makes that point by telling her listeners about the confusion in a classroom of black South African children when the students first realized that she, a black woman, was American. They all watched "Baywatch" with its story line of beach-front intrigue, she says, and "didn't know people like me existed in this country."