In a normal year, Goodwill of Northern New England coordinates three AmeriCorps programs focused on education, poverty reduction, and refugee and immigrant services. Last summer, it piloted a fourth program called the Covid Care Corps, in Manchester, N.H., which added 16 AmeriCorps Vista members to help staff public-health phone information lines and testing sites and created a hub for local nonprofits to announce food giveaways and other services.
Some of the AmeriCorps staff worked directly for Goodwill, while others were assigned to other nonprofits and cities in the area that were eager for the extra help, including, the Nashua Police Athletic League, the City of Manchester Health Department, Emergency Management of the City of Nashua and the Boys and Girls Club of Manchester.
The pilot program was a big success, says Steve Niles, AmeriCorps program manager for Goodwill of Northern New England, which operates in Maine and New Hampshire. Goodwill has secured year-round funding through a combination of AmeriCorps and stimulus funds, says Niles, enough to bring on a total of 20 AmeriCorps Vista members to help local nonprofits deal with the effects of the pandemic.
“In the summer, we had a huge demand from both nonprofit partners and interested AmeriCorps members,” says Niles. “It really was just a matter of money.”
He added, “If we had more money, we could have more members on the ground serving.”
Now national service advocates hope a Biden administration will pave the way for a big expansion of programs like the Covid Care Corps to deal with the pandemic and recovery efforts.
Since the pandemic began, we’ve had a tremendous uptick in interest for AmeriCorps programs.
“My experience of dealing with them is they’re really interested in the ways in which AmeriCorps can ramp up to provide additional supports to communities,” said AnnMaura Connolly, president of Voices for National Service, a group that lobbies for expanded national service programs.
That’s a big shift in expectations from the Trump administration, which “essentially had no interest in the work of national service,” said Leslie Lenkowsky, professor emeritus at the Lilly School of Philanthropy at Indiana University and a former head of the Corporation for Community and National Service — renamed last year to just AmeriCorps. Trump administration’s proposed budgets proposed eliminating AmeriCorps entirely.
On January 21, the Biden administration issued an executive order to direct federal agencies to develop plans for a Public Health Job Corps that would focus on responding to the coronavirus. The details still have to be worked out, but the program will be modeled on AmeriCorp’s disaster-focused FEMA Corps program and would be administered under AmeriCorps’ National Civilian Conservation Corps program.
According to AmeriCorps officials, 24,000 AmeriCorps members at some point worked on Covid-19 response and recovery activities, putting in more than 2 million hours so far. They worked in contact tracing, staffed testing and vaccination sites, and helped overburdened food banks. Those efforts have assisted 4.5 million U.S. residents and provided nearly 11 million meals, AmeriCorps officials say. Those numbers only reflect AmeriCorps members “directly” involved in Covid response. They do not include AmeriCorps members working in other capacities, such as education, that have also been significantly challenged by the pandemic.
And during the pandemic, interest in working with AmeriCorps has mushroomed.
“Since the pandemic began, we’ve had a tremendous uptick in interest for AmeriCorps programs. One of our recruiters used the word ‘exploding,’” said Samantha Warfield, spokeswoman for AmeriCorps. “Applications over the summer period increased 25 to 40 percent over the previous year.”
Legislation Needed
However, further expansions of national service programs would require Congress to act. A budget bill in Congress calls for a $1 billion expansion of national service programs specifically to tackle Covid relief and recovery efforts, which would double AmeriCorp’s budget. In a typical year, AmeriCorps has funding for 75,000 service assignments. The program was funded for $1.1 billion in fiscal year 2020.
Key figures for national service advocates in Congress are Senators Chris Coons, Democrat of Delaware, and Roger Wicker, Republican of Mississippi. In 2020, they co-sponsored the Corps Act, which would have expanded the number of AmeriCorps positions across the country from 75,000 to 250,000 in three years and would have increased the stipends paid to AmeriCorps members.
The Corps Act would have also prioritized funding for national service programs directly related to Covid response and recovery programs. The bill didn’t make it far in 2020. Officials with Coons’s office said they expect to reintroduce the Corps Act within the next few weeks. In a statement, an aide from Wicker’s office said the Senator continues to work with Coons’s office “to advance a bipartisan national service proposal, similar to last year’s Corps Act.”
Opposition to AmeriCorps
There is expected to be at least some opposition to expanded national service efforts.
“There remains a lot of opposition to AmeriCorps, not only among conservatives but also liberals who would prefer in many ways not to have what they regard as untrained amateurs providing services,” said Lenkowsky, noting teacher-union opposition to programs like Teach for America, which places AmeriCorps workers in schools. “There are also budget pressures that’ll be there, and we’re still trying to figure out what the federal budget situation should look like.”
National service advocates argue the programs pay for themselves in the long run. A study commissioned by Voices for National Service released July 2020 argued that national service programs produce about $3.50 in tax revenue savings for every $1 spent on AmeriCorps national service programs by providing job training for its members and reducing costs for other government programs through AmeriCorps-facilitated projects. And they also fund service opportunities that are beyond the scope of a typical infrequent volunteer.
In other words, opponents of national service programs ask, “Why do we need to pay people to volunteer when there are millions of people who do it for free,” said Nathan Dietz, who studies volunteerism with the University of Maryland’s Do Good Institute. “The answer is most people don’t do anything like that amount of service. It’s a really serious commitment to be involved in a national service program.”
