Weston describes several of the Center’s current projects. For instance, one of them seeks “to integrate mental health systems with education systems,” starting with the Moberly Public Schools, and eventually applying the model elsewhere. For this purpose, they have begun an organization called the Moberly Community Coalition for Children and Families to address children’s mental health. “It’s been a fantastic learning experience,” observes Weston. “They have really built awareness in the community around the need to address children’s mental health and to promote mental health. We take a preventative approach, arguing that we should be paying attention to children’s social and emotional development, that we should be promoting mental health the same way we promote physical health.”

One of the Center’s new projects is funded through the Department of Health and Senior Services. This interdisciplinary effort is working across the state on community development, with a focus on children’s mental health.

At the first and only sanctioned online-degree program with a focus on mental health issues in schools in the country, students can take individual courses based on their unique needs through continuing education, and even earn a degree at the Masters or Education Specialist level. Recognized as a national model, the Center’s online program focuses on evidence-based practice and on current, practical application-driven principles and tested theories; people working in the field can take coursework in areas with which they are being confronted professionally.

Nick Spina is originally from Michigan. “I joined the PC immediately after graduating from Michigan State. I graduated in May and left the country in June.” As an economics and political science major, Spina had already engaged heavily in international studies: “I found out about the Peace Corps during my sophomore year, and it really seemed to fit into what I was studying.” Spina had also done a good deal of volunteering, “so it seemed like a good combination of several things that I enjoyed doing.” Moreover, Spina wanted to be able to speak another language. “That’s very difficult to do in a classroom,” he observed. “When you live in a country, you have a much better opportunity to learn the language fluently. I don’t think I ever got to that point, but I got pretty close.”

From 2004 to 2006, he worked in Armenia. “When I was told I was going to Armenia, I didn’t know where it was, so I had to get a map and look,” admits Spina, who was assigned to be a community development volunteer with a local non-governmental organization on human rights issues. Spina worked on a range of different projects. “We tried to educate the community members on everything from human trafficking, and how to write a business plan, to English.”

“A community development volunteer spends a lot of his/her time planning different projects based on what the community needs,” Spina explains. “So we do a lot talking, have a lot of meetings to figure out what the community needs and how to go about addressing those needs.”

While Spina worked on a number of different projects, he feels especially good about one, which involved organizing and implementing a summer camp for 10- to 15-year-old Armenian boys. As he explains, “we had a plan to teach them about things they weren’t being taught in schools, such as health, hygiene, nutrition—things they are not going to get from a traditional Armenian education, but that are absolutely crucial to quality of life issues. We talked about HIV/AIDS, sexual health, things that they need to hear early on…[but are] taboo topics in Armenia, so we were having very frank conversations about how to live a healthy lifestyle. And I was pretty proud of that because I know those boys have an advantage over their peers because they received information that is very useful and important,” he says.

Those young boys were, however, not the only ones who benefited from the summer camp. “My language got a lot better over that period of time because in order to communicate with teenage boys, you talk a lot and you learn to have a sense of humor with them,” he notes. “That always stands out in my mind as a really good experience for everybody involved.” While the teachers were Americans, they were paired with an Armenian teacher, “so the boys were not just getting a one-sided view from an American.” That was important, explains Spina, because “the whole point of Peace Corps, of course, is to learn from each other. Americans learn from Armenians, and Armenians learn from Americans. This was a great opportunity to fulfill those goals.”

Spina employed a particular strategy to help him become integrated into the community, a city of 60,000 people. “I wanted to meet people my age. And the best way I could figure out how to do that was to join the local youth basketball team,” he explains. “We practiced every day, and we had games all around the city and other cities. It was a really unique experience to be the foreigner on a sports team.”

Regardless of the reason for joining the Peace Corps, all of these returned volunteers found the decision had changed them, and that they took more from their experience than they felt they had actually given.

• “People always say, ‘oh, that must have really changed you.’” Matt Rysavy says. “It’s true that living in a different culture for two years, you can’t ever get away from it. I’m not going to go into international work, but in everything that I approach, I do so differently because of that experience.” While he is keeping his career options open as a graduate student in MU’s Truman School for Public Policy, Rysavy hopes to work with non-profits someday, helping them become more efficient in how they operate and utilize public funding.
  
  
• Julie Feeney is currently studying social work: “I went through a lot of transitions when I first came back from Peace Corps, still kind of searching, which I think is pretty common for someone my age. I really enjoyed working with the youth group when I was in Paraguay. I tried teaching, and I like that connection with adolescents, so my goal as a social worker is to work on youth empowerment.” This interest derives from multiple influences, the strongest of which, Feeney finds, is the work she did in Paraguay.
  
  
• When he finished his own service in 2001, Craig Hutton took a job working for the Peace Corps in Washington, D.C., at the organization’s headquarters. “My Peace Corps experience really influenced that. I was interested in international development, definitely interested in what was international but also really interested in the agency itself, so I worked there for five years in a couple of different positions,” he explains. “My experience in Peace Corps made me start thinking about graduate school and graduate education.” Hutton sees himself working in the area of international development and community development training.
  
  
• “When I graduated from school, frankly I didn’t know what I wanted to do,” Nick Spina remembers. “I knew I wanted to do the Peace Corps, but after that it was kind of up in the air.” Serving in the Peace Corps, he said, “solidified my desire to become a teacher, because at the heart of it all every Peace Corps volunteer is a teacher. And I really found that I enjoyed communicating with people and talking about international issues. So when I returned to the United States, I started looking for programs to pursue a graduate degree in political science.”
  
  
• Upon her re-entry to the United States, it took Kate Fjell some time to decompress and think about her Peace Corps experiences before determining her next step: “I knew that I was really interested in doing community development work. I really started to understand the power of working with individuals and having those individuals make change for themselves.” Fjell came to this realization upon encountering a surplus of non-governmental organizations in Malawi. “They’re doing some really good work, but the challenge, of course, is that if you give people everything, then they sort of stop trying to figure out how to do it for themselves,” she says. Fjell is now in the Rural Sociology program at MU, where she hopes to continue giving rural communities the means to help themselves.