‘What's more patriotic than Americans helping other Americans?'

Boston Globe

19-05-2025

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TODAY'S STARTING POINT
Nicole Kach has always wanted to help people. Growing up in Seekonk, Mass., Kach cleared trails with the Girl Scouts and volunteered at the town food pantry. During her junior year at UMass Dartmouth, she led a service trip to Guatemala to help install water filtration systems.
So when the head of her college's office of community service suggested she consider serving with AmeriCorps after graduating last spring, Kach agreed. She applied to be a team leader with the National Civilian Community Corps, part of a network of AmeriCorps programs that fields teams of young adults to work on community service projects across the US for months at a time. 'It's important to give back to others,' Kach wrote in her application, 'and I believe that participating in AmeriCorps is one of the ways I can do that.'
A few months later, Kach was on the other side of the country, leading a team of a dozen NCCC members to fireproof a campsite and retreat center in Julian, Calif. After that, her team headed to the Seattle area, where they worked at a food bank and helped low-income residents file their taxes.
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Then Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency stepped in.
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Kach was helping a woman with her tax return when her boss called. The Trump administration had ordered her team demobilized. Kach and her fellow corps members needed to leave their worksite, pack their things, and return to AmeriCorps' regional hub in Sacramento immediately. Their service was over.
'I just remember dropping to the floor and just sobbing,' Kach said. 'Probably the hardest thing that I've ever done was telling the team that we were going home.'
Besides sadness, Kach's main emotion was confusion. Congress had already appropriated funding for AmeriCorps. Her team was already out in the field. 'We just all thought that we were doing such good work for the communities we were in,' she said. (The White House has called AmeriCorps 'a target-rich environment for President Trump's agenda to eliminate waste, fraud, and abuse,' even though an audit of the agency last year made no claims of fraud
Besides Kach's, the administration has demobilized NCCC teams that were building homes in North Carolina, facilitating afterschool programs in Arizona, and
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It's hard for me to be objective about Kach and her work because I also did AmeriCorps. For 10 months between high school and college, I served as a tutor and classroom assistant in a Boston public school with an AmeriCorps program called City Year. The administration's grant terminations have impacted City Year's operations in several cities, a program spokesman told me.
AmeriCorps has long had bipartisan support. The agency began in 1993 under Bill Clinton, but many Republicans
'People I'm talking with are in advanced stages of sorrow,' Goldsmith said.
Their concerns reflect the many ways AmeriCorps' work helps people. Independent studies find that some of the agency's programs generate
National service also exposes those who undertake it to people unlike themselves. Kach's team reflected the country, comprising corps members from Texas, New Jersey, Ohio, Arizona, and Puerto Rico. The City Year team I served on remains the most socioeconomically diverse group I've ever worked with. 'You can think about it as helping understand the lives of others, which is important,' said Goldsmith, who is now a Harvard professor. 'But you can also think about it as a training ground for civic leadership.'
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AmeriCorps isn't for everyone. The work is poorly compensated and can be grueling. Kach received a $500 stipend every two weeks; her corps members got even less. Over five months, four of them dropped out. 'I went into AmeriCorps knowing I was gonna be dirt poor,' Kach said. 'I did it because I believed in the mission.'
Kach is now back at her parents' home in Seekonk applying for jobs. She's confident she'll land on her feet, but less sure about those her service was helping. 'It's a question as to who's going to do this work,' she said.
Still, Kach left even more convinced that AmeriCorps was good for her, is good for America, and is worth preserving.
'It made me realize for sure that the biggest thing I want to do is to continue to help the country,' she said. 'That sounds so cringey to be like, 'I want to keep helping people!' But it's honest-to-God true.'
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