Maura Fulton's Involvement with Peace Corps
Maura Fulton (sitting third from the left) at a resconstructed school in Ache, Indonesia
From Athens to Thailand to Washington, DC, Ohio University graduate Maura Fulton has extended her International Studies education well beyond the classroom. She received her Master’s degree in International Development Studies in 1999, and with many years of service across the globe with the Peace Corps, became the executive director of Peace Corps Encore! in 2005.
Fulton began her relationship with the Peace Corps in 1995 when she served in Micronesia as a volunteer for two years. Assigned to the remote outer islands of the state of Yap, she taught at the elementary school and worked on community development with women’s and youth groups.
“Because of that experience and my interest in international development, I decided to pursue a degree in (that field), and I chose Ohio,” she said. Fulton was a graduate assistant for the Center of International Studies during the two years she spent in Athens. In her second year, she was a representative for the center in the Graduate Student Senate and was awarded Outstanding Master’s Student of 1999.
In 2000, the Peace Corps selected her to start a new program in the Republic of Georgia and serve as the Programming and Training Officer. The first project was an education project in which Joshua O’Donnell, Ohio’s Peace Corps recruitment officer, served as a volunteer.
“My job (as an officer) involved everything that had to do with training the volunteers from pre-service to in-service training, and also developing their project plan, establishing their site placements and working with the schools where they would be placed,” she said.
Fulton served a second tour in 2002 as Peace Corps staff in Thailand. Though the program there was well established, she was brought in to invigorate the education project and to start a new organizational development project, she said.
She met the co-founders of Peace Corps Encore! when she returned to the United States to present at a National Peace Corps Association conference in Chicago. “I became really excited and interesting in this whole idea and took it back to my volunteers in Thailand as a way to say, ‘Your commitment to volunteer service overseas doesn’t have to end,’” she said.
After working in Boston, Fulton moved to Washington, DC and became executive director of the new program. In her position, she develops strategic partnerships with non-profit organizations to create overseas projects and opportunities for Encore! volunteers that can last from “three weeks to three months,” she said.
Peace Corps Encore!, a non-profit organization, is not officially affiliated with the Peace Corps, which is a government agency. Founded by Jerr Boschee and Chris Klose in late 2003, the program began as a way to give those who are former Peace Corps volunteers or staff an opportunity to continue their service overseas, Fulton said.
“The idea is recognizing and valuing that former Peace Corps volunteers and staff have this amazing breadth and depth of cross-cultural experience, have lived and worked in a developing country, and also have professional expertise in a certain sector, but don’t necessarily want to commit to another two years of service,” Fulton said. “We’re deploying them as volunteer expert consultants for short-term assignments that can last from three weeks to three months.”
Encore! began operations in December 2005 and was able to deploy ten volunteers throughout Peru, Armenia, India and Indonesia. Since its start-up, the program has doubled the number of former volunteers and staff in its online database to 1500 people.
The programmatic highlight of Encore!’s pilot year was the establishment of a partnership with United Way International, Fulton said. United Way has made a long-term commitment to help communities in India, Indonesia and Thailand recover from the tsunami that struck in the area in December 2004.
“We partner with them to deploy volunteers to those communities and help with things like project management, organizational development for the staff and local partners, and supporting their program efforts,” she said. The efforts include housing and school reconstruction, educational programming and support for fishermen and their villages.
Encore! was founded in part as a way to involve Baby Boomers and those moving into their retirement years. “A growing trend in the United States is finding ways to engage this aging population in meaningful service so that people feel like they’re actually contributing with their talent and skills,” she said.
Fulton returned to Athens in June 2006 to consult with members of the International Development Studies program and to present an International Studies lecture. “It was a really great opportunity to talk about Peace Corps Encore!, and I also gave a talk on strength-based approaches to development,” she said.
Interviewed and written by Maria Gallucci
Updated on Jan 19, 2007