When Anita Annan, a 22-year-old Denver native and daughter of immigrants, arrived in Uganda this month to begin service as a Peace Corps literacy specialist, she joined a historically robust cadre of Colorado volunteers amid a recent national surge in applications.

For years, the state’s representation has been disproportionately high within the overseas service organization. With more than 7,000 volunteers since the program’s inception, it ranks 12th nationally.

In per capita calculations, Colorado ranks sixth overall — but first among the 12 states claiming the most volunteers. The state ranks 22nd in total population.

Annan, who occasionally visited her parents’ homeland of Ghana and attended an international-oriented school whose teachers shared tales of their own Peace Corps experience, has a theory about her home state’s standing as a major player: Colorado’s folksy, cowboy image belies its role as a multicultural hub.

“There was a large surge of African immigrants in the ’80s — my parents were among those,” says Annan. “Even if it wasn’t a very intentional thing when I was younger, just the fact that my parents were from somewhere else opened my eyes to always realizing that the world was so much bigger than where I was that moment in time.”

Nationally, the spike in interest appears to be partly the result of new policies that have streamlined a notoriously long application and given volunteers more choice in their postings.

The Peace Corps, established by executive order in 1961, recently reported a 40-year high of about 23,000 applications for fiscal 2015, up 32 percent from the previous year and the most since 1975.

Paperwork that used to take several hours to complete now can be done online in about an hour. Applicants can request locations and programs they prefer, while previously, the Peace Corps dictated overseas postings.

“I think the electronic version online and the power of choice is important,” says Kiiva Williams, spokeswoman for the Peace Corps’ Southwest Regional Office, which includes Colorado. “It’s part of that modern process where you apply and see where your skills work best. We’re excited that people are raising their hands and committed to serving the country this way.”

Michelle Jones, 27, who grew up in the town of Pine, attended a returning volunteer’s presentation while she was a student majoring in English education and performing arts at Colorado State University. She filed the experience away for future reference.

After a year of teaching at Platte Canyon High School, she felt she could be doing more — and the Peace Corps seemed a potentially fulfilling outlet.

“I woke up one morning and said, ‘I gotta do this,’ ” she says. “I’ve got to see if there’s a way to fulfill the wants I had in my career as well as help countries and people that really truly need the skills I can teach them.”

Although the new, streamlined application still seemed difficult, she was accepted for a spot teaching English in Thailand — her second choice of location after Peru.

She’ll head overseas in January. Until then, she’s continuing her current job performing as a sword fighter in a Renaissance troupe. She hopes eventually to incorporate her theater background into her teaching.

Her decision to join the Peace Corps didn’t surprise her close friends.

“They’re all a bunch of nonconforming people,” she says. “One is teaching in the Marshall Islands. Another is an apprentice saddle maker. Another is a career juggler — I mean, he juggles for money. All idealistic dreamers.

“I’d say I’m motivated by the idealistic, but when I function it’s in the realist category. You can’t be a dreamer and not know how to get things done.”

The state’s high volunteer rate, she adds, probably owes something to Colorado’s highly educated populace. About 90 percent of applicants in the competitive process have at least a bachelor’s degree.

“The more educated you are, the more you realize there are bigger problems in the world outside your direct community, and there’s something you can offer,” she says. “You recognize the inner connectedness.”

Education also figures into the equation another way, as Colorado colleges have been major contributors to the Peace Corps.

The University of Colorado Boulder ranks fifth nationally in the number of alumni who have worked overseas since 1961, with over 2,400 volunteers, while other schools across the state have been magnets for individuals interested in combining international service and graduate degrees.

Thirty-year-old Matt Bloise, whose family settled in Colorado Springs when he was 10, attended CU Boulder as an undergrad and credits the school’s emphasis on civic engagement as sparking his initial interest in the Peace Corps.

But after graduating at the dawn of the recession with a degree in English, he took a career detour into journalism for a couple of years in California before taking a job at a call center back in Colorado.

“The Peace Corps,” he says, “was an opportunity to reinvent myself.”

He launched into the famously lengthy application process — his finished product totaled more than 80 pages. After about a year of interviews and follow-ups, he was nominated for a spot and headed to mainland China in 2012 to work as an English teacher until his posting ended last year.

Like many returned volunteers, he found Colorado a good landing spot to use his Peace Corps experience as a springboard to graduate school.

Programs at CU, the University of Denver, Colorado State and Western State Colorado University have attracted students from within the state’s borders and across the country.

The Peace Corps’ Paul D. Coverdell Fellows Program draws returned volunteers to graduate school at participating colleges, while its Master’s International program prepares students for overseas service.

Bloise became a Coverdell Fellow at DU’s Josef Korbel School of International Studies, where he’s working on his master’s degree in international economics.

At DU, students inclined toward the Peace Corps are “the clientele we want the most,” says Brad Miller, the Korbel school’s director of graduate admissions.

“It’s people who have work experience that we really like to see in our graduate program,” he says. “It’s people who have language skills. It’s people who understand that international relations is not just going to Paris, but going to places like Mozambique and going without warm water for two years. It’s that hardship field work that employers like to see. And that’s what we like to see in our incoming students.”

The draw of the state’s graduate programs figures prominently in Colorado’s reputation as a national leader in volunteers, says Karen Gardenier, CSU’s assistant director of academic programs for the school’s Office of International Programs.

“We’re really a strong recruiter, so we’re getting a lot from those populations,” she says. “Then you have this sort of independence and adventurous attitude among Coloradans that makes people open to this kind of experience.”

Those Coloradans include a significant number of transplants among the natives — people like Adel Uhlarik, who grew up in Texas, where she got her undergraduate degree in biology and then began teaching high school science in Austin.

But captivated by the possibility of a stint in the Peace Corps and knowing that she wanted to attend graduate school, she felt drawn to CSU’s Peace Corps Masters International program.

And after 27 months in Senegal — no electricity, no running water, no English — she returned to Fort Collins to finish the academic portion of her studies, in which her masters thesis was shaped by her overseas experience.

In the process, she became yet another Colorado alumna with ties to the Peace Corps. Uhlarik isn’t sure whether the state breeds a call to service or simply attracts an altruistic group. “But it’s a lot of people in general who want to do something bigger than themselves,” she says.

Case in point: When Uhlarik looked for a way to help the community as she started her studies at CSU, she ran into an unexpected problem after offering her time to a local soup kitchen.

“It was always booked full of volunteers,” Uhlarik recalls. “It was insane. I was on their stand-by list. That just blew my mind — the fact that on a Friday night I couldn’t volunteer in a soup kitchen in Fort Collins spoke volumes. What kind of community am I in?”

Transplant Octavius Jones, 28, grew up in California, got his undergraduate degree at the University of Wisconsin and spent three years on a Peace Corps posting to Botswana, where he worked to address AIDS within the country.

Upon his return stateside, he worked at the Peace Corps’ Washington, D.C., headquarters before graduate school eventually brought him to Colorado. When he told people he was applying to CSU to pursue his masters, he started to realize how many of his international service colleagues had connections to the state.

“Part of the pull is the culture,” he figures, “just the people around Colorado. There’s an openness to other people and new ideas. That’s what attracts people to the Peace Corps as well, so it goes hand in hand with that.”

Kevin Simpson: 303-954-1739, ksimpson@denverpost.com or @ksimpsondp