Agenda for Aaron Williams
 
As a former PCV, and specifically as Peace Corps Desk Officer for the DR when Director Williams was there, I congratulate him and wish him well.
 
There are a lot of priorities and pressures to leap into large-scale expansion of the Peace Corps.
 
These are well meaning impulses, but I urge Director Williams to concentrate first on extricating the Peace Corps from its current, UNHEALTHY intimate integration with the US foreign assistance establishment (which itself is in danger of being subsumed within the US foreign policy apparatus).
 
The Peace Corps, in its best and most effective incarnation, is different from USAID, and the Peace Corps is even MORE different from the US State Department. All three arms of US overseas relations will be stronger if they are independent and free to pursue the unique benefits that flow from their different programs and constituencies.
 
I offer this advice based on my service as a Peace Corps Volunteer in pre-intervention Chile, as a headquarters staff member in the LA region, including 2 years as Program and Training Chief for the Latin America and Caribbean Region, and my last forty years of working in several dimensions of US foreign operations — governmental, quasi-governmental, and private.
 
Bruce Potter
 
President
Island Resources Foundation
35 Years of Environmental Planning for Small Island Development
 
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Road Town, Tortola
BRITISH VIRGIN ISLANDS
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In St. Thomas, US Virgin Islands
call: 340/775-6225
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