The Foreign Service Journal, October 2008

center on boosting “selection, sup- port and supervision.” It would involve recruiting more experienced volunteers, providing all volunteers with extensive training and the sup- port of development experts, and dramatically boosting staff oversight of volunteers to ensure that they do the job they were assigned to do. Key to Strauss’s strategy would be a lifting of the current requirement that limits most Peace Corps em- ployees to five years of service. The current system, he argues, throws out the deadwood along with the good, and erodes the Peace Corps’ institutional memory, destining it to try the same ill-fated reform plans time after time. Ludlam and Hirschoff, by contrast, put the blame for the ills they see less on ill-prepared volunteers and more on indifferent staff. “We see the Peace Corps as a middle- aged bureaucracy where hierarchy and rigid controls pre- vail,” they told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last year. “Volunteers sit at the bottom of the pyramid, where their needs are often ignored. What we need is an upside- down hierarchy, an inverted pyra- mid, in which support of the volun- teers takes precedence.” The Dodd bill would go a long way toward fixing the problem, they argue, by giving volunteers a greater say in evaluating Peace Corps staff and by providing for confidential consultations with vol- unteers on the merits of their development projects. Longtime Peace Corps watchers say the debate over the bill is just the latest chapter in a long-running power struggle between agency staff and volunteers that won’t be resolved anytime soon, if history is any guide. Accordingly, it will be up to the next adminis- tration to determine how to proceed. n F O C U S 26 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / O C T O B E R 2 0 0 8 “Volunteers sit at the bottom of the pyramid, where their needs are often ignored.” — Volunteers Chuck Ludlam and Paula Hirschof