Dear Houston PCA,

If you looked closely at the bottom of our last dispatch, you may have noticed a rendering of the donor recognition pedestals planned for the main entrance to Peace Corps Park on Louisiana Ave and 1st St NW in Washington, D.C. It got one line and one photo last time, but it deserves more than that.

That’s because we are very limited in how we can recognize the contributions of the lead donors in our community: on National Park Service land, no permanent donor recognition is allowed. Names can be recognized on-site for a fixed window of 10 years only, demanding a level of selflessness from major supporters who, with other projects, might be offered permanent naming rights for their contributions.

But those supporters have accepted the limitation, believing that the benefit of having our values represented among the national federal memorials that represent our country's core values matters more than having their name carved forever into stone.

As with other design constraints our design team has had to navigate, they landed on a simple, humble solution: two stainless-steel pedestals placed at the Park's main entrance. One will carry the project credits (design team, stone carver, fabrication partner, the builders, the Foundation) and the other will carry the names from the highest tier of donors. After 10 years, the pedestals will be removed, to be preserved at a permanent location off-site.

Many Peace Corps volunteers chose to serve because they felt a sense of purpose beyond themselves, and none of the Park’s donors are asking for permanence; they’re asking for participation, generation after generation. 

This tribute will stand for every single person in the Peace Corps community: volunteers, as well as their local friends, neighbors and counterparts, no names required.

Give $250,000 or more, cumulatively, and your name goes on that pedestal. The same is true for a group whose combined contributions reach $250,000. The Friends of Sam Farr campaign is already past the $100,000 mark, and the Friends of Malaysia RPCV group, has raised more than $75,000 from its generous members. Both are proof that this isn't a threshold only a handful of people can reach alone, but one a community can reach together.

Not every gift will reach that number, and that's all right. This Park is also being built, quite literally, out of gifts of every size — the cost of a single bench segment, a tree providing shade along the allée on one side of the Park, an element of the digital companion platform that will let people all over the world engage with the volunteer experience from their smartphone.

None of that will be on the pedestal. All of it will be in the Park.

I've been thinking about this idea in a different context this summer too: A new training cohort just departed for Cambodia, a group that will include the 250,000th volunteer in Peace Corps history — one person, indistinguishable from the many thousands before them, who happened to be the one to tip a 65-year community into an entirely new tier. That's how movements work: No single name carries it, every name does.

Which is why the pedestal isn't really the point. The point is the list, the record, the community of support that played a part in making it happen. Every donation, at any level, earns a spot on our digital donor wall, a permanent record of everyone who said yes to this bold idea. We'll stop adding new names once the Park is fully funded, but the list itself will remain on the Park website to commemorate the community that built it.

This is the part of the story where the Park stops being something we're building and starts being something we all built. If you've been meaning to give, this is the moment. If your Peace Corps cohort has a reunion on the calendar, consider making a Park gift part of it. If you lead a country group or an alumni network, we'd love to talk about sharing this story with your list.

Every new name turns this memorial into a movement.

Yours in service,

Glenn A. Blumhorst
Chief Advancement Officer
Peace Corps Commemorative Foundation

GBlumhorst@PeaceCorpsCommemorative.org

Campaign progress

To date, this dedicated community has raised $8,722,000, or 62.3%, of the $14,000,000 budget for Peace Corps Park and its digital companion, leaving $5.28 million to our goal.

We gratefully thank the following 127 supporters who have made new donations and/or pledges since Aug. 12, 2026, contributing $73,900 to the construction of Peace Corps Park:

*indicates new gift in addition to previous contributions
Explore the full list of donors on our website

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