This week’s Featured Peacebuilding Group is AmeriCorps, a network of national service programs, made up of three primary programs that each take a different approach to improving lives and fostering civic engagement. Members commit their time to address critical community needs like increasing academic achievement, mentoring youth, fighting poverty, sustaining national parks, preparing for disasters, and more.
For young people just out of high school or college, AmeriCorps is an ideal form of alternative service, kind of like a domestic Peace Corps. One of my son’s friends who graduated with him from the University of Maryland is current teaching chemistry in a high school in Arkansas (Samantha Schweickhardt) before she heads to medical school.