Program Support Fund
Program Overview:The goal of our Program Support Fund is to make small but strategic grants to strengthen current Peace Corps programs and to support the efforts of individual Peace Corps Volunteers and the people they serve. These guidelines are intentionally flexible to encourage initiative and innovation by Volunteers and staff, help fill gaps in existing funding sources, permit timely response to situations that could cause worthy efforts from being cancelled or delayed during a Volunteer’s period of service and to help foster cooperative efforts with Dominican entities.
PSF grants have supported a wide variety of initiatives over the years. Most recently during the pandemic, we have provided food, health kits and other community pandemic relief to 350 poor Dominican Families during the pandemic, in cooperation with our NGO partners-TECHO and Rustic Pathways Foundation. In past years we’ve made grants to hold teacher training workshops in Samana and Elias Pina; to send PCVs and local counterparts to a seafood and ecotourism fair; to equip a recently built rural community resource center with chairs, computers, an inverter and window bars; to support a two-day “Train-the-Trainers” workshop for 40 PCVs and local counterparts to spread the Peace Corps-developed PC Skillz youth program on healthy decision making and HIV/AIDS education; to license Adobe Cloud and In Design software used by Volunteers to produce the in-country newsletter/magazine for PCVs; to run regional Brigada Verde youth environmental education workshops, held in cooperation with students and faculty from the National Environmental School and local PCV-led Brigada Verde groups; to print and bind 250 PCV-written 140-page Brigada Verde teaching manuals for use by incoming volunteers interested in forming Brigada Verde groups in their communities and by students and faculty at the Environmental School.
Previous grants in past years have been used to fund a Declaro Mis Derechos training program for legal immigration promoters near the Haitian border; fund a national conference for Declaro Mis Derechos promoters; buy surveying, GPS and pipe threading equipment used by Volunteers working on community water supply projects; purchase a laminator to make educational materials used by public health Volunteers; pay for guided tours of the Colonial Zone to help new Volunteers better understand Dominican history; support a national Brigda Verde conference in Jarabacoa; equip two new libraries with books and other materials, as well as provide hurricane and flooding relief.
A complete list Program Support Fund projects can be found here.
To see the Application and Funding Process, go here.
