Compass Corps
Bilateral Peer-to-Peer Service Program
Compass Corps is a bilateral, peer-to-peer service program between the United States and China. It is designed for gap-year students, career-break professionals, retired teachers, nurses, farmers, engineers, and anyone with practical skills and a willingness to serve in an unfamiliar community.
The idea is that we can accomplish much more together than apart. We can both develop and build up one another and serve the world together, despite differences.
Reciprocal Exchange
Compass Corps begins with a month-long, fully reciprocal exchange. Americans spend one month living and working in a Chinese village or urban neighborhood together with local Chinese Compass Corps volunteers. Simultaneously or sequentially, Chinese spend one month living and working in an American rural town or post-industrial city together with local American Compass Corps volunteers. Each cohort is roughly half American and half Chinese. They serve side-by-side on locally-defined revitalization projects: teaching language, supporting community clinics, documenting oral histories, helping small farmers or shopkeepers access digital tools, repairing community spaces, or running summer programs for children and elderly.
Global Collaboration
Once the bilateral model between the US and China is proven—once we have trained hundreds of participants, refined the protocols, and built a community of alumni—Compass Corps will replicate the model, but with US and Chinese volunteers collaborating together in developing contexts globally. The same peer-to-peer structure, the same service commitment, the same ethos of mutual service. Not one country sending volunteers to another, but two countries sending volunteers together.