On April 5, 1933, during the Great Depression, President Franklin D. Roosevelt created the Civilian Conservation Corps, which employed 3 million young men to improve U.S. parks, public lands, and forests. The prospect of three meals a day, lodging, and $30 a month drew many, as jobs were scarce; Congress backed the Corps for nine years.
Fast forward nine decades. On Sept. 20, President Joe Biden announced the American Climate Corps, modeled on FDR’s program, with the goal of hiring and providing job training to 20,000 young people over the next year in clean energy, conservation, and climate resilience. The drastically pared-down program, whose cost has not been disclosed, will be managed by AmeriCorps, the federal agency for national service and volunteerism founded in 1993 by President Bill Clinton.
Biden’s Climate Corps is a far cry from the April 2021 congressional proposal, which would have spent $132 billion to hire 1.5 million people over five years, or the president’s original $10 billion plan, announced in March 2021. Funding was dropped in the final version of the Inflation Reduction Act.
But the shortfall in funding has opened up an opportunity for philanthropy, especially at the state level. Separately, five states — Arizona, Maryland, Minnesota, North Carolina, and Utah — are using philanthropic dollars to launch their own Climate Corps, which will train 25 young people in each state.
“We obviously have been disappointed we didn’t get a big [Civilian Climate Corps] that we were all planning for in the Build Back Better conversations,” said Kristen Bennett, CEO of the Service Year Alliance, a nonprofit that promotes national service work. “What I think this ultimately will allow for is more intentional and smart scale.”
The state of California, which was the first to launch its own Climate Corps, in September 2020, is steering about $5 million in philanthropic funding to the five states through a nonprofit called the California Volunteers Fund, which coordinates private sector partnerships with California’s volunteerism and service agency. Each state will receive $945,000. California’s service agency will also advise officials leading the Climate Corps in the five states.
Among the philanthropic supporters of the state Climate Corps are the Waverley Street Foundation, the climate foundation funded by Laurene Powell Jobs, and philanthropists Susie and Mark Buell.
Environmentalist Wendy Abrams’ Eleven Eleven Foundation and oil heiress and philanthropist Aileen Getty’s foundation, both of which award grants to climate and environmental groups, also contributed to the five state-level Climate Corps. The California Volunteers Fund declined to share how much each foundation contributed.
Susie Buell says she heard about the Climate Corps expansion from Aileen Getty and was immediately supportive of it.
“It’s really an intuitive understanding for me about what needs to be done,” she said. “You’ve got to get young people involved and get them to understand what [an] existential situation we’re in.”
Brainchild of Youth Activists
The American Climate Corps was the brainchild of youth activists. The Sunrise Movement, which describes itself as “a youth movement to stop climate change and create millions of good jobs in the process,” spearheaded the push for a corps during the 2020 presidential campaign. Sunrise, together with environmental nonprofits, workforce development groups, and other organizations, launched the Partnership for the Civilian Climate Corps in January 2023 to press the federal government to hire 300,000 Climate Corps members each year.
But even before the federal effort stalled in Congress, states moved to implement their own versions of the Climate Corps. In 2020, California became the first state to announce the creation of its Climate Corps. Since then, Colorado, Maine, Michigan, and Washington have started their own programs.
Kif Scheuer, a consultant who previously oversaw the California Climate Action Corps, says the approach looks different in every state.
“Some are building on things that have existed for a very long time and bundling them together,” he said. “Some are trying to repackage something new. I think they’re all great experiments.”
That is true of the Climate Corps programs rolling out in Arizona, Maryland, Minnesota, North Carolina, and Utah, which will be run by state agencies or universities. Some will use the new philanthropic funds to grow preexisting AmeriCorps programs focused on environmental issues, while others are launching new efforts.
North Carolina will create 25 new roles for AmeriCorps members working largely in rural areas and will support projects such as mitigating flood risks and preventing wildfires. Minnesota will use the funding from California and federal dollars to create 25 positions to retrofit residential homes and public buildings for improved energy efficiency.
Northern Arizona University is using the philanthropic support and $475,000 in federal AmeriCorps funding to expand its Environmental Literacy Corps, an AmeriCorps program that promotes climate education. The university will offer the maximum living stipend allowed under AmeriCorps rules, equivalent to $19 per hour, and will waive fees for nonprofits and municipalities that host AmeriCorps members. Typically, nonprofits and municipalities need to match federal funds to bring on an AmeriCorps member. Those host fees vary depending on the program, but often range from $10,000 to $20,000, making it difficult for less-resourced organizations to participate.
Utah has had a rockier start. Utah State University, which runs several AmeriCorps programs in the state, announced on Sept. 21 it would use $500,000 in AmeriCorps funding, passed through the state commission UServeUtah, along with the private funding to hire 25 Climate Corps members to reduce wildfire risks and provide access to food. Soon after, the state funding was put on pause. UServeUtah and Utah State University declined to share additional information about why the funding was paused or whether the program will continue with financial support from the California Volunteers Fund.
Implementation Questions Remain
Climate Corps supporters are excited about Biden’s announcement, but they have questions about how the program will be implemented and say more philanthropic funding is needed.
“There’s critical opportunities for place-based funders, workforce development funders, and funders supporting the climate movement to come to the table to advance this idea,” said Bennett of Service Year Alliance.
Bennett pointed to the Schultz Family Foundation’s collaboration with Washington State’s service commission as an example of philanthropic support. To attract more diverse participants, the foundation provided about $1.7 million to increase stipends for AmeriCorps members distributing food during the Covid-19 pandemic. It also subsidized the fees nonprofits needed to pay to host AmeriCorps members.
Bill Sadler, program director of CivicSpark, an AmeriCorps program that connects fellows to local governments working on sustainability projects, says those subsidies could be vital for AmeriCorps programs that often have limited dollars to supplement living allowances.
“A lot of AmeriCorps programs have recruitment challenges right now because of the cost of living,” he said. “If philanthropy can supplement that, it can really help programs like ours recruit more members.”
Scheuer, who helped develop a toolkit for states interested in creating Climate Corps, says there’s also room for philanthropy to seed more localized versions of the Climate Corps. AmeriCorps programs are reliant on host fees, which are paid for by organizations bringing on AmeriCorps members and can be difficult to get when launching a new program. Having philanthropic dollars that make programs less reliant on those fees can help get them off the ground, he says.
It’s still too early to assess how the national effort will work, says Mark Paul, an environmental economist at Rutgers University. Supporters are looking to see how the federal agencies involved will collaborate and to what degree community and philanthropic input will shape the roll-out.
One existing AmeriCorps effort focused on environmental issues will inform the new approach. The National Civilian Community Corps recruits about 2,200 members a year to respond to disasters and support climate-change mitigation, according to Jonah Bryson, a spokesperson for AmeriCorps.
“The American Climate Corps will leverage and expand existing programs while meeting the urgency of the climate crisis,” Bryson wrote in an email. One $15 million program focused on wildfires and reforestation called the AmeriCorps NCCC Forest Corps has been launched as part of the American Climate Corps so far.
Though funding details are still scarce, there is hope that the new program will succeed in training many young Americans in climate-change mitigation work. An Oct. 12 Mashable article reported that more than 42,000 people have signed up to express interest in joining the program.
“We’ve been really concerned about giving future generations an opportunity to take action and intentionally invest in workforce and talent pipelines to build new jobs in the clean energy industry,” Bennett said. “And we’re feeling like the American Climate Corps represents a step toward fulfilling that promise.”
Reporting for this article was underwritten by a Lilly Endowment grant to enhance public understanding of philanthropy. The Chronicle is solely responsible for the content. See more about the Chronicle, the grant, how our foundation-supported journalism works, and our gift-acceptance policy.
