The Village Welfare Service (V.W.S.), a student and faculty volunteer organization based at the American University of Beirut (A.U.B.) and the American Junior College for Women, held summer camps in rural areas in Syria and Lebanon in the nineteen thirties and forties. The camps’ “mission of the educated youth to the fellah” was to improve village life while instilling a service ethic in student volunteers. Archival evidence indicates that the summer camps emerged from a shared desire among American missionaries, faculty members, and student volunteers to formulate a program of development and education appropriate to rural life that would stem migration and deracination among students and peasants alike. The V.W.S. emphasized contact between volunteers and villagers in the belief that, by exchanging the former’s expertise and enthusiasm for the latter’s folk values and attachment to the land, both groups would lead more hygienic, ordered, and culturally authentic lives. Daily life in the V.W.S. summer camps was organized to produce patriotic attitudes among youth by uniting young people of both genders and different sects in a common project. The camps also facilitated interactions with shaykhs and peasants that seemed to confirm the notion that youth should shoulder the burden of national progress. At the same time, anxieties about the unavoidable roles of leisure and amateurism in the practice of the camps plagued the organization. Such tensions in the formulation of the V.W.S. project, along with the outbreak of the Second World War, hindered the realization of a village welfare “movement” led by educated youth as envisioned in the mid-thirties. While ostensibly apolitical, the V.W.S.’s effort to situate youth in national time and space by bringing them into rural areas appealed to patriotic sentiments among students and young professionals. The V.W.S. sought to put into practice a patriotic ideal of youth that resonated with the broader nationalist zeitgeist exemplified in Sati’ al-Husri’s 1935 pronouncement that “the coming age will be the age of youth.” Juxtaposing the V.W.S. summer camps with the contemporary emphasis on a politically transformative youth, this paper argues that nationalist youth vanguardism emerged from a confluence of multiple historical projects that each held young people to be the key to an authentic modernity in the interwar Arab Middle East.