The Peace Corps works by first announcing its availability to foreign governments. These governments then determine in what areas they feel trained volunteers can help their citizens. Peace Corps then matches the requested assignments to its pool of applicants and sends those volunteers with the appropriate skills to the countries who first made the requests.
The program officially has three goals:
On March 1, 1961, Kennedy signed Executive Order 10924, which officially started the Peace Corps, and on March 4, he appointed Sargent Shriver to be the program's first director. Shriver was tasked with fleshing out the organization, which he did with the help of Warren W. Wiggins and others. Shriver and his think tank outlined the three major goals of the Peace Corps and decided the number of volunteers they needed to recruit. The program began recruiting volunteers that following July.
Until about 1967, applicants to the Peace Corps had to pass a placement test that tested "general aptitude" (knowledge of various skills needed for various Peace Corps assignments) and language aptitude. After an address from Kennedy on August 28, 1961, the first group of volunteers left for Ghana and Tanzania. The program was formally authorized on September 22, 1961, by Congress, and within two years, over 7,300 Peace Corps volunteers were serving in 44 countries. This number would jump to 15,000 in June of 1966, the largest number in the organization's history.
Despite its promising beginnings, the Peace Corps was almost finished before it began due to a scandal on October 13, 1961. Volunteer Marjorie Michelmore in Nigeria wrote a postcard to her boyfriend in the US in which she described the "squalor and absolutely primitive living conditions" of Nigeria. Somehow, the postcard never made it into the mail. A Nigerian student at the University College at Ibadan found it and made copies to distribute around campus. Nigerian students accused the volunteers of being spies of the US government or agents of imperialists. The story was picked up by the international press, and some people began to question the future of the program as a whole. After several days of isolation imposed on volunteers by angry Nigerian students, the American personnel went on a hunger strike. Organizations such as the Nigerian-American Society and the Organization of Nigerians Trained in America also came to the Peace Corps' defense. Finally, the Nigerian students agreed to open a dialogue with the Americans, and the scandal ended.
In July of 1971, President Richard M. Nixon brought the Peace Corps under the umbrella agency, ACTION. Peace Corps would remain under ACTION until President Jimmy Carter declared it fully autonomous in a 1979 executive order. This independent status would be further secured when Congress passed legislation in 1981 to make the organization an independent federal agency.
Peace Corps had always had a reputation as a "hippy organization", mostly concerned with education- and agriculture-related projects. In 1982, Reagan appointee Director Loret Miller Ruppe initiated several new business-related programs. For the first time, large numbers of Republican volunteers joined their Democrat counterparts as overseas volunteers, and the organization gained a reputation as a non-partisan endeavor. Nevertheless, funding cuts during the 1980s dropped the number of volunteers to 5,380, its lowest level since the organization's early years. Funding increased again in 1985, and Congress passed an initiative to raise the number of volunteers to 10,000 by 1992.
Following the September 11 terrorist attacks, President George W. Bush vowed to double the size of the organization within five years as part of his War on Terrorism. Congress later passed a budget increase for the 2004 fiscal year in order to fulfill that goal.