AFSC’s work camps were inspired by the initiatives of Swiss war resister Pierre Ceresole in Europe. Bringing work camps to the United States in the 1930s marked a transition for the Service Committee from healing the wounds of war to striving for justice as the way toward peace.
Volunteers spent a month, a summer, or a year working where they were needed. In their service to others, the participants cultivated their own devotion to the struggle for social justice.
According to noted work camp leader David Richie, post-war America had “serious unsolved social problems of unemployment, poverty, and racial tension.” Dave wanted people to combine the act of studying these problems with work to heal them.
After taking part in our first U.S. work camp in 1934, he went on to found and lead camps between 1940 and 1973. Richie also developed the first weekend camps, which could appeal to “less socially conscious young people and [help] them to grow in awareness and commitment.” For 40 years, work camping changed the lives of young people by giving them the experience that “work is love made visible."
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At AFSC’s first U.S. work camp in 1934, volunteers helped install a water system for coal miners at the Westmoreland Homestead, a federal resettlement community in Pennsylvania.
David Richie (right) visits the Westmoreland camp with lifelong Quaker activist Wilmer Young in 1934.
In 1936, work campers build a playground for children in the underserved neighborhood of Kensington in Philadelphia.
Before work campers built a new water system in 1940, Elta Blackgoat walked a half mile every day to obtain water for her family on the 16 million-acre Navajo Reservation.
In 1948, campers built two Quonset hut dormitories (dedicated here) allowing Navajo children to attend school, despite living long distances from school.
A group of high school students spent half the summer of 1957 painting a community center for Russian refugees in Glendora, California. Photo: Olcutt Sanders
Campers make adobe bricks with members of the Maricopa Indian Cooperative Association in New Mexico.
In 1952, a junior work camp focused on landscaping and construction work for a health center in the small village of Cuba, New Mexico.
Public health nurse Johnnie Smith measures carefully at the monthly prenatal and well-baby clinic run by the work camp in Cuba, New Mexico.
Elizabeth Graf encourages group work through building with blocks in Austin, Texas, in 1957.
The work camp experience included shared silence and group discussions about pacifism and the pressing problems of the region—here, at Lame Deer, Montana, in 1960.
In 1962, at one of many camps founded by David Richie, a group of young work campers convert a vacant lot into a playground in West Poplar area of Philadelphia.
It’s not all work and no play at the West Poplar work camp in 1962.
A 1969 camp in Pipestem, West Virginia, coincided with an Appalachian heritage festival that featured masters in traditional music, quilting, and other arts.
