The Peace Corps’ longstanding collaborative history with the Eastern Caribbean stretches back to the very launch of the global volunteer programme in 1961, when Saint Lucia was named one of the first three nations worldwide to host U.S. Peace Corps Volunteers. Over the 65 years that followed, more than 4,372 American volunteers have completed service across the Eastern Caribbean subregion, contributing to local development priorities spanning agriculture, education, and community infrastructure. Today, 44 U.S. Peace Corps Volunteers remain stationed across four Eastern Caribbean nations: Saint Lucia, Dominica, Grenada, and St Vincent and the Grenadines. These current volunteers operate in close coordination with local Ministries of Education, focusing on boosting primary-level English literacy outcomes and fostering meaningful, people-to-people cultural exchange between U.S. citizens and Caribbean communities. Last week, this decades-long partnership was formally honoured at an official 65th anniversary commemoration hosted in partnership with the Saint Lucian government at Delcer Combined School, located in the Choiseul district of Saint Lucia. The event was officiated by Karin Sullivan, Chargé d’Affaires of the U.S. Embassy to Barbados, the Eastern Caribbean and the OECS, alongside a delegation of key stakeholders including Peace Corps Country Director Kimberly Will, Saint Lucia’s Minister for Education, Youth Development, Sports, and Digital Transformation Kenson Casimir, Peace Corps Chief of Staff Richard Swarttz, and Acting Governor General of Saint Lucia His Excellency Felix Finisterre. During the ceremony, Sullivan paid special tribute to one of the very first Peace Corps initiatives launched in Saint Lucia: the landmark JFK Canal project, developed in the early 1960s in partnership with the island’s Ministry of Agriculture. The canal, a transformative piece of irrigation infrastructure, dramatically expanded agricultural productivity for smallholder farmers across Saint Lucia’s southern districts for generations. Centered on the official theme “Honouring the Past, Marching into the Future”, the anniversary event wove recognition of that historic infrastructure legacy with forward-looking sustainability action: attendees planted a series of fruit trees across the grounds of Delcer Combined School as living, growing tributes to the Peace Corps’ decades of regional impact. A public statement released by the U.S. Embassy noted that the newly planted trees draw water from the same regional watershed that originally fed the JFK Canal, serving as a tangible, multi-layered symbol of the enduring cross-national partnership, shared commitment to environmental sustainability, and the ripple effects of community-led collaborative action that have defined the Peace Corps’ work across the Eastern Caribbean since its founding.