This morning, we're talking about the 50th anniversary of the Peace Corps. We asked you about your experience volunteering.

Fifty years ago this month, then-Senator John F. Kennedy delivered a rousing speech asking the nation to take part in the global community. Kennedy's call for the nation’s young to volunteer their time and efforts would soon become the Peace Corps.

As the Peace Corps celebrates 50 years, we're looking for your stories of volunteering. Whether you were in the Peace Corps or not, when and where have you volunteered service — at home or abroad? And what made you do it?

Read more about then-Senator John F. Kennedy's speech in Michigan, where he called students to serve people in need all over the world.

With the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico dominating news headlines, some families are reacting by turning off the TV. But other families have instead chosen to respond by signing up to volunteer, as a family. Megan Miller and her 16-year-old daughter Savannah  Miller are signed on as volunteers with the Alabama Coastal Foundation. Together, along with dad Sean and 13-year-old sister Annalese, the Millers plan to help clean up the coast.

A group of mayors from around the country, including New York City's Michael Bloomberg, are awarding a new set of grants on Martin Luther King Jr. Day. The grants will go to ten cities, and are designed to encourage service in urban areas.

Science is leaving the lab with "citizen science," which asks volunteers to participate in local experiments that contribute to a greater scientific end. View a slideshow of "citizen science" experiments that you can conduct, ranging in size from the subatomic to the galactic after the jump.

Starting in 1882 and continuing for almost a century, the United State's Bird Migration Program collected two-by-five notecards from bird watchers around North America. Today, these long preserved cards — did we mention that there were over six million of them? — are being dusted off, in the hopes that they can tell us something about a bird of a different feather: climate change. Jessica Zelt, coordinator of the newly established North American Bird Phenology Program where she is in charge of digitizing the cards, joins the show to tell us more.

Are you itchin' to get your hands on a little American history? You can transcribe the migration notecards into the digital directory from your very own home. Click here to help! Go on, be a part of bird history.

For more, read Molly Webster's Producer's Note

And before we let you go, we'd like to leave you with a little bird quote from our friends here at the Internet, because really, what's the World Wide Web good for if not to root-out some profound, bird-related witticisms? Ahem: "My favorite weather is bird-chirping weather." ~Loire Hartwould

(c) USGS.gov

(c) USGS.gov